"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."

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“A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it.”

“The theatre is supremely fitted to say: "Behold! These things are." Yet most dramatists employ it to say: "This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action.”

“Thornton Wilder at the Internet Movie Database”

“Money is like manure; it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow.”

“Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.”

“Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.”

Resonant Thoughts

"It is odd how pleasant and sympathetic her poems are, in these days when many a poet had rather walk down children like Mr. Hyde than weep over them like Swinburne, and when many a poem is gruesome oc…"

— Randall Jarrell

Literature1914–1965

#family

"It must be confessed that a sort of halo of personal grandeur surrounds a great actress."

— Charles Reade

Literature1814–1884

#family

"Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be free from King George and continue the slaves of King Prejudice? What is it to be born free and not to live free? What is the value of any politi…"

— Henry David Thoreau

Literature1817–1862

#freedom

"Are not the richest and most significant experiences of man precisely those which are the least patient of verbal reproduction? A book, a treatise, a discourse, is the very thing that cannot contain t…"

— L. P. Jacks

Philosophy1860–1955

#writing