Thornton Wilder Quotes

Eternity: what a waste of time.

So we must love, while these moments are still called today, take part in the pain of this passion play, stretching our youth as we must, until we are ashes to dust, until time makes history of us.

Eternity - waste of time.

So much universe, and so little time.

No. The universe has to move forward. Pain and loss, they define us as much as happiness or love. Whether it's a world, or a relationship... Everything has its time. And everything ends.

Life really is very brief.

We can only die in the future, I thought; right now we are always alive.

Exhaust the little moment / Soon it dies.

If time and space, as sages say, Are things which cannot be, The sun which does not feel decay No greater is than we. So why, Love, should we ever pray To live a century? The butterfly that lives a day Has lived eternity.

A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on. And one day you die. That is all there is to it.

Time's ruins build eternity's mansions.

What is the flesh and blood compounded ofBut a few moments in the life of time?This prowling of the cells, litigious love,Wears the long claw of flesh-arguing crime.

The vanity of human life is like a river, constantly passing away, and yet constantly coming on.

We mourn the transitory things and fret under the yoke of the immutable ones.

You get what anybody gets - you get a lifetime.

Death is the end of the fear of death. [...] To avoid it we must not stop fearing it and so life is fear. Death is time because time allows us to move toward death which we fear at all times when alive. We move around and that is fear. Movement through space requires time. Without death there is no movement through space and no life and no fear. To be aware of death is to be alive is to fear is to move around in space and time toward death.

This was what it meant to be human, to know that time moved and all things changed.

It's not that "today is the first day of the rest of my life," but that now is all there is of my life.

We cross infinity with every step; we meet eternity in every second.

This loving person is a person who abhors waste - waste of time, waste of human potential. How much time we waste. As if we were going to live forever.

Before birth; yes, what time was it then? A time like now, and when they were dead, it would be still like now: these trees, that sky, this earth, those acorn seeds, sun and wind, all the same, while they, with dust-turned hearts, change only.

O Time! Time! how it brings forth and devours! And the roaring flood of existence rushes on forever similar, forever changing!

In truth, how much time do any of us really have?

Remember that even if you were to live for three thousand years, or thirty thousand, you could not lose any other life than the one you have, and there will be no other life after it. So the longest and the shortest lives are the same. The present moment is shared by all living creatures, but the time that is past is gone forever. No one can lose the past or the future, for if they don't belong to you, how can they be taken from you?

There are many things worth telling that are not quite narrative. And eternity itself possesses no beginning, middle or end. Fossils, arrowheads, castle ruins, empty crosses: from the Parthenon to the Bo Tree to a grown man's or woman's old stuffed bear, what moves us about many objects is not what remains but what has vanished. There comes a time, thanks to rivers, when a few beautiful old teeth are all that remain of the two-hundred-foot spires of life we call trees. There comes a river, whose current is time, that does a similar sculpting in the mind.