Time & Perspective Quote by Thornton Wilder

Wilder sneaks a moral program into what sounds like friendly lifestyle advice: build a daily ritual of contact with greatness, and your taste (and by extension your character) will be quietly rewired. “Seek the lofty” is an old-fashioned phrase, but he pairs it with a surprisingly practical prescription. Not “study,” not “master,” not even “create” - just read, hear, see. The verb list turns high culture into an everyday practice of attention, almost hygienic, like brushing your teeth.

The shrewdness is in the modest time frame: “at some moment every day.” Wilder isn’t arguing for a heroic retreat into art; he’s telling you that five minutes with Bach, Dickinson, Giotto, or a great play is enough to tug the inner needle. That smallness is the seduction. It lowers the barrier while implying the stakes are large: without regular exposure to serious work, the mind defaults to the easy, the loud, the merely current.

Context matters. Wilder wrote in a century where mass entertainment exploded and war tested the idea of “civilization.” As a dramatist and novelist, he watched audiences get trained by speed, spectacle, and sentimentality. The line reads like a quiet countermeasure: a personal discipline against cultural drift. There’s also a democratizing subtext. He doesn’t say “go to the salon” or “join the canon”; he says encounter “great work” through the senses available to anyone. Loftiness, in Wilder’s framing, isn’t a pedigree. It’s a habit of choosing what enlarges you over what flatters you.