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

Nurse one vice in your bosom. Give it the attention it deserves and let your virtues spring up modestly around it. Then you'll have the miser who's no liar and the drunkard who's the benefactor of a whole city.

— Thornton Wilder

Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English and don't even want to.

— Thornton Wilder

People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Main’t natural to be lonesome.

— Thornton Wilder

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

— Thornton Wilder

Pride avarice and envy are in every home.

— Thornton Wilder

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

— Thornton Wilder

She did not suspect that the Abbess was even there hovering about the house, herself estimating the stresses and watching for the moment when a burden harms and not strengthens.

— Thornton Wilder

She resembled the swallow in the fable who once every thousand years transferred a grain of wheat, in the hope of rearing a mountain to reach the moon. Such persons are raised up in every age; they obstinately insist on transporting their grains of wheat, and they derive a certain exhilaration from the sneers of the bystanders. “How queerly they dress!” we cry. “How queerly they dress!

— 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.

— Thornton Wilder