Thornton Wilder Quotes

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.

I enjoy learning about different periods and people, and then taking what's universal about the human condition and seeing where it matches up. No matter where you are, certain things unite everybody.

The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same - dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits - the repetition through the ages is comedy.

Events tend to recur in cycles.

I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.

Every time history repeats itself the price goes up.

I am a Jew: Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with die same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is?

When the audience begins to see the sunrise on that it's hard for them to turn away from it because they're listening to a man talking to them from over a century ago. And nothing has changed. So what are you going to do about that?

Believe me, you have to have a certain confidence in your powers of descretion to let a dentist loose with a drill in your mouth less than an hour after you've...um...entertained his wife.

A body of work may be reviled - mostly by those who have no knowledge of its workings - and yet still carry elements of what can only be considered eternal truths.

Why must everything be repeat and repeat, never finish, never resting? You work so hard one day, but the next day you must only work again. You eat, but the next day, you are already hungry. You find love, then love goes away. You are born with nothing, you work hard, then you die with nothing. You are young, then you are old. No matter how hard you work, you cannot stop getting old. - Wayan

There have been waves of reform in the past. I see no reason why they wouldn't happen again.

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn't that what we're all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.

By law of periodical repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again -- and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another's and each obeying its own law.

And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.

I think Bergman's films have eternal relevance, because they deal with the difficulty of personal relationships and lack of communication between people and religious aspirations and mortality, existential themes that will be relevant a thousand years from now. When many of the things that are successful and trendy today will have been long relegated to musty-looking antiques, his stuff will still be great.

Once you've heard the joke, it's not funny anymore, but it's the way it's told. And I think that's the same with the music: The reason some of my songs have lasted longer is there's a lot of stuff packed in there. You want to hear them more than once.

Those works alone can have enduring success which successfully appeal to what is permanent in human nature -- which, while suiting the taste of the day, contain truths and beauty deeper than the opinions and tastes of the day.

All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.

Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one's core. Rome'll decline and fall again, Cortés'll lay Tenochtitlán to waste again, and later, Ewing will sail again, Adrian'll be blown to pieces again, you and I'll sleep under the Corsican stars again, I'll come to Bruges again, fall in and out of love with Eva again, you'll read this letter again, the sun'll grow cold again. Nietzsche's gramophone record. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternities.

History is the same thing over and over again.

What's been tried once had been tried once before... and before... and before...

There is repetition everywhere, and nothing is found only once in the world.

This, however, is sure: nothing is really lost. Any influence for good, no matter how ephemeral, makes its mark: it helps to leaven the loaf of evil: it leaves a loophole, albeit a small one, for a future escape from bondage.