Thornton Wilder Quotes

Art is a magic which makes the hours melt away and even days dissolve into seconds

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Art has always been and is in its very essence the boldest departure from nature. It is the bridge into the spirit world.

Beauty is a primeval phenomenon, which itself never makes its appearance, but the reflection of which is visible in a thousand different utterances of the creative mind, and is as various as nature herself.

There’s a real question as to what beauty is and why it’s important to us. Many pseudo-philosophers try to answer these questions and tell us they’re not really answerable. I draw on art and literature, and music in particular, because music is a wonderful example of something that’s in this world but not of this world. Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.

Art still has truth. Take refuge there.

I love art. It really changes my mood and wakes me up.

Art is the contemplation of the world in a state of grace.

A great painting or symphony or play, doesn't diminish us, but enlarges us, and we, too, want to make our own cry of affirmation to the power of Creation behind the Universe.

Most of the faint intimations of immortality of which we are occasionally aware would seem to arise out of Art or the materials of Art.

The beauty of poetry is that the creation transcends the poet.

An artist in my eyes, is someone who can lighten up a dark room. I have never and will never find difference between the pass from Pele to Carlos Alberto in the final of the World Cup in 1970 and the poetry of the young Rimbaud, who stretches cords from steeple to steeple and garlands from window to window. There is in each of these human manifestations an expression of beauty which touches us and gives us a feeling of eternity.

The next song I wrote in Paris years ago in a dream. So I didn't really write it, the universe wrote it. And that's what I believe about music, I believe it belongs to the universe, it comes from there and it's this beautiful energy that we share that transcends normal flash existence and that we inspire each other through.

Art is a sense of magic.

There was a village watercolour society and they'd come and paint in my field. I watched them from the window, the way they would struggle this way and that to find the perfect moment. God has made every angle on that beautiful, and I felt that tremendously.

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

Searching for music is like searching for God. They're very similar. There's an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable, all those things, comes into being a composer and to writing music and to searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don't exist.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

I think of art as the highest level of creativity. To me, it is one of the greatest sources of enjoyment.

When you see or hear something beautiful, it's like that thing is transmitting a kind of energy, and if that energy helped create the work, the only thing I can do is play it when I finally show the work.

My parents taught me to believe that through the creative act, we're able to transcend and give a response to desecration.

Art is about play and about transcendent meanings, not reducible to politics.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

The first thing is, jazz is one of the few things to let you know that there is a God and there is a creation.

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.