Quote #36

Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.

More from Thornton Wilder

  1. It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.
  2. Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
  3. One of the dangers of the American artist is that he finds himself almost exclusively thrown in with persons more or less in the arts. He l…
  4. A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference and a longer view and finds them incongruous. It dam…
  5. I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exce…
  6. 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.
  7. The theatre is supremely fitted to say: 'Behold! These things are.' Yet most dramatists employ it to say: 'This moral truth can be learned …
  8. Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.

All Thornton Wilder quotes