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How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you rip the fronts off houses you'd find swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?

Thornton Wilder

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Thornton Wilder
Age: 78 †
Born: 1897
Born: April 17
Died: 1975
Died: December 7
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Madison
Wisconsin
Thornton Niven Wilder
Find
Houses
Matter
Fronts
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Hell
World
Doubt
Hate
House
Swine
Happens
Rip
Doe
Foul

More quotes by Thornton Wilder

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People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome.
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Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.
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Look at that moon. Potato weather for sure.
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Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.
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There is one regard in which bullies show real perception when compared with their victims it is their silent good-natured pleasure of the moment.
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Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
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I am my own judge of what truths I shall tell. The truth can do just as much harm as a lie.
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He regarded love as a sort of cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of living.
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When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery ... He wants him to know all that being alive can bring. That is his best gift.... There is no happiness save in understanding the whole.
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A man looks pretty small at a wedding, George. All those good women standing shoulder to shoulder, making sure that the knot's tied in a mighty public way.
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Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
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A dramatist is one who from his earliest years has found that sheer gazing at the shocks and counter-shocks among people is quite sufficiently engrossing without having to encase it in comment.
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When you're safe at home you wish you were having an adventure when you're having an adventure you wish you were safe at home.
Thornton Wilder
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There's nothing like mixing with women to bring out all the foolishness in a man of sense.
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I not only bow to the inevitable I am fortified by it.
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The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth.
Thornton Wilder
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It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.
Thornton Wilder
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The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.
Thornton Wilder
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We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
Thornton Wilder
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Winning children (who appear so guileless) are children who have discovered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calculated spontaneity are in winning what they want.
Thornton Wilder