Quote #42

When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery : 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.

More from Thornton Wilder

  1. 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.
  2. Imagination draws on memory. Memory and imagination combined can stage a Servants' Ball or even write a book, if that's what they want to d…
  3. Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.
  4. An incinerator is a writer's best friend.
  5. 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.
  6. For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation?
  7. 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…
  8. If I wasn't an actor, I'd be a secret agent.

All Thornton Wilder quotes