Thornton Wilder

The theatre is supremely fitted to say: 'Behold! These things are.' Yet most dramatists employ it to say: 'This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action.'

Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.

Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?

Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it, you say to yourself "Oh now I've got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home. And the sign that something's wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure.

Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.

But there comes a moment in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among the human beings or not - a fool among fools or a fool alone.

Money is like manure; it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow.

That’s what it was like to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those...of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know- that’s the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness. -Simon Stimson, OUR TOWN

Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.

We do not choose the day of our birth nor may we choose the day of our death, yet choice is the sovereign faculty of the mind.

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.

Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.

What is essential does not die but clarifies.

If a man has no vices, he is in great danger of making vices about his virtues, and there's a spectacle.

Even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other.

Being employed is like being loved: you know that somebody's thinking about you the whole time.

Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.

Imprisonment of the body is bitter; imprisonment of the mind is worse