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The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Thornton Wilder

Thornton Wilder

[Camila] was quite incapable of establishing any harmony between the claims of her art, of her appetites, or her dreams, and of her crowded daily routine. Each of these was a world in itself.

Thornton Wilder

I want you to try and remember what it was like to have been very young.And particularly the days when you were first in love; when you were like a person sleepwalking, and you didn’t quite see the street you were in, and didn’t quite hear everything that was said to you.You’re just a little bit crazy. Will you remember that, please?

Thornton Wilder

You swore you loved me, and laughed and warned me that you would not love me forever. I did not hear you. You were speaking in a language I did not understand. Never, never, I can conceive of a love which is able to foresee its own termination. Love is its own eternity. Love is in every moment of its being: all time. It is the only glimpse we are permitted of what eternity is. So I did not hear you. The words were nonsense.

eternity, love, permanence

Thornton Wilder

Look at that moon. Potato weather for sure.

facts, moon, potatoes, weather

Thornton Wilder

But such occasions of excellence became less and less frequent. As her technique became sounder, [her] sincerity became less necessary.

excellence, routine, sincerity

Thornton Wilder

There is no need for me to curse you -the murderer survives the victim only to learn that it was himself that he longed to be rid of. Hatred is self-hatred.

Thornton Wilder

The art of biography is more difficult than is generally supposed.

art, difficulty, personality

Thornton Wilder

Perhaps she would learn in time to permit both her daughter and her gods to govern their own affairs.

Thornton Wilder

The mind of Caesar. It is the reverse of most men’s. It rejoices in committing itself. To us arrive each day a score of challenges; we must say yes or no to decisions that will set off chains of consequences. Some of us deliberate; some of us refuse the decision, which is itself a decision; some of us leap giddily into the decision, setting our jaws and closing our eyes, which is the sort of decision of despair. Caesar embraces decision. It is as though he felt his mind to be operating only when it is interlocking itself with significant consequences. Caesar shrinks from no responsibility. He heaps more and more upon his shoulders.

decisiveness, responsibility

Thornton Wilder

So – people a thousand years from now…This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.

living-life, memory, our-town, remains

Thornton Wilder

the condition of leadership adds new degrees of solitariness to the basic solitude of mankind. Every order that we issue increases the extent to which we are alone, and every show of deference which is extended to us separates us from our fellows.

leadership, soltitude

Thornton Wilder

Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.

leadership, public-good