"Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?"
— Thornton Wilder (Our Town: A Play in Three Acts)

"Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it -- every, every minute?"
— Thornton Wilder

"My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it is on your plate."
— Thornton Wilder

"The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude."
— Thornton Wilder

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

"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."
— Thornton Wilder

"But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."
— Thornton Wilder

"Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you."
— Thornton Wilder (Our Town: A Play in Three Acts)

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

""[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.""
— Thornton Wilder

"We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.

-stage manager, in the play OUR TOWN"
— Thornton Wilder

"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"
— Thornton Wilder

"Faith is a never-ending pool of clarity, reaching far beyond the margins of consciousness. We all know more than we know we know. "
— Thornton Wilder (The Eighth Day)

"Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but theremay never be two that love one another equally well."
— Thornton Wilder (The Bridge of San Luis Rey)

"“It’s when you’re safe at home that you wish you were having an adventure. When you’re having an adventure you wish you were safe at home.” "
— Thornton Wilder

"EMILY: "Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute?"

STAGE MANAGER: "No. Saints and poets maybe...they do some."
— Thornton Wilder (Our Town: A Play in Three Acts)

"Never support two weaknesses at the same time. It's your combination sinners - your lecherous liars and your miserly drunkards - who dishonor the vices and bring them into bad repute."
— Thornton Wilder

"Money is like manure; it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow."
— Thornton Wilder (The Matchmaker A Farce in Four Acts)

"Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer's day, and some say, to the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God."
— Thornton Wilder (The Bridge of San Luis Rey)

"An American is insubmissive, lonely, self-educated, and polite."
— Thornton Wilder

"Does anybody realize what life is
while they're living it- every, every minute?"
— Thornton Wilder (Our Town: A Play in Three Acts)

"I think that it can be assumed that no adults are ever really 'shocked' - that being shocked is always a pose."
— Thornton Wilder

"There is no drunkenness equal to that of remembering whispered words in the night."
— Thornton Wilder

"I didn't marry you because you were perfect. I didn't even marry you because I loved you. I married you because you gave me a promise. That promise made up for your faults. And the promise I gave you made up for mine. Two imperfect people got married and it was the promise that made the marriage. And when our children were growing up, it wasn't a house that protected them; and it wasn't our love that protected them--it was that promise."
— Thornton Wilder (The Skin of Our Teeth: A Play)

"The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth."
— Thornton Wilder (The Bridge of San Luis Rey)

"On Friday noon, July twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below."
— Thornton Wilder (The Bridge of San Luis Rey)

"[Dona Maria] saw that the people of this world moved about in an armor of egotism, drunk with self-gazing, athirst for compliments, hearing little of what was said to them, unmoved by the accidents that befell their closest friends, in dread of all appeals that might interrupt their long communion with their own desires."
— Thornton Wilder (The Bridge of San Luis Rey)

"[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 (The Bridge of San Luis Rey)

"My advice to you is not to inquire into why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate -- that's my philosophy."
— Thornton Wilder (The Skin of Our Teeth: A Play)

"Simon Stimson: "...That's what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings 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.""
— Thornton Wilder (Our Town: A Play in Three Acts)

"Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?--every, every minute?"
— Thornton Wilder (Our Town: A Play in Three Acts)

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

"He possessed the six attributes of the adventurer-- a memory for names and faces, with the aptitude for altering his own; the gift of tongues; inexhaustible invention; secrecy; the talent for falling into conversation with strangers; and that freedom from conscience that springs from a contempt for the dozing rich he preyed upon."
— Thornton Wilder

"Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world."
— Thornton Wilder (The Bridge of San Luis Rey)

"There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."
— Thornton Wilder (The Bridge of San Luis Rey)

"In love's service, only the wounded soldier can serve."
— Thornton Wilder

"Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous."
— Thornton Wilder

"Once you have swung a pickax that will reveal the curve of a street four thousand years covered over which was once an active, much-traveled highway, you are never quite the same again."
— Thornton Wilder

"Emily: Do any human beings ever realise life while they live it?--every, every minute?

Stage Manager: No. The saints and poets, maybe--they do some."
— Thornton Wilder

"Are you still alive? Alive? How can you endure it? All your thoughts are guesses, all you body is shaken with breath, all your senses are infirm, and your mind ever full of the fumes of one passion or another. Oh, what misery to be a man. Hurry and die!"
— Thornton Wilder (The Cabala)