Thornton Wilder

Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.

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

Love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it gives birth to visions and great poetry, remains among the sharpest impressions of self-interest. Not until it has passed through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties.

Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.

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

The cosmic spirit is given to us in order that we may analyze, weigh, and clarify things in us which nettle us, or which we are outgrowing. Or trying to reshape.

It is only appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.

Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.

The planting of trees is the least self-centered of all that we do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.

When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest mystery…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.