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Who really said it

We can only be said to be alive in the moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasure

Written by Thornton Wilder April 17, 1897 – December 7, 1975 · American novelist and playwright
Wilder’s sentence is confirmed word-for-word in the 1930 first edition, on p. 36 — the wording in the headline above has drifted by one word. Free to reuse

Wilder wrote this line in his third novel, The Woman of Andros (Albert & Charles Boni, February 1930), where the courtesan Chrysis speaks it at a banquet while telling the fable of a hero allowed one day back on earth. The attribution is solid — but the wording above has drifted: Wilder wrote “in those moments,” not “in the moments,” and the full sentence continues “…for our hearts are not strong enough to love every moment.”

Last verified 8 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“We can only be said to be alive in the moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasure” Thornton Wilder, The Woman of Andros (New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1930), p. 36. Wilder's exact wording: "Suddenly the hero saw that the living too are dead and that we can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasure; for our hearts are not strong enough to love every moment." Spoken by the character Chrysis. Public domain in the United States. Verified via Quotle.info.

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Provenance

The source

Work
The Woman of Andros
First published
21 February 1930 · Albert & Charles Boni, New York
Page
p. 36 of the 1930 first edition (p. 149 in the HarperCollins reprint)
Spoken by
Chrysis, at a banquet on the island of Brynos

“My friends,” continued Chrysis, turning her eyes slowly from face to face, “as he awoke in his boyhood’s room, pain filled his heart,—not only because it had started beating again, but because he saw the walls of his home and knew that in a moment he would see his parents who lay long since in the earth of that country. He descended into the courtyard. His mother lifted her eyes from the loom and greeted him and went on with her work. His father passed through the court unseeing, for on that day his mind had been full of care. Suddenly the hero saw that the living too are dead and that we can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasure; for our hearts are not strong enough to love every moment. And not an hour had gone by before the hero who was both watching life and living it called on Zeus to release him from so terrible a dream. The gods heard him, but before he left he fell upon the ground and kissed the soil of the world that is too dear to be realized.” Chrysis’ fable of the hero who returns from the dead

Transcribed from Project Gutenberg eBook #78024 ↗, which reproduces the Albert & Charles Boni first edition with its original pagination marked. The page break to p. 37 falls after the passage, placing the sentence on p. 36.

Full text of the 1930 novel
Read The Woman of Andros and search for the passage
Project Gutenberg eBook #78024 — The Woman of Andros (1930)

How we verified this

  • The specialists pinned it first. The Thornton Wilder Society ↗ identifies the quotation as coming from The Woman of Andros, spoken by Chrysis during a banquet scene in which she tells her guests a story about a hero and the King of the Dead, and locates it at p. 149 of the HarperCollins reprint.
  • Then the primary text confirmed it. The complete novel is available at Project Gutenberg ↗, which records the original publication as New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1930. The sentence appears there exactly once, on page 36 of that edition — with the singular “treasure” and the words “in those moments.”
  • The publication date is independently documented. The Society’s page on the novel ↗ dates it to 21 February 1930, Wilder’s third novel; Wikipedia ↗ gives February 1930 and the same publisher, and notes it was the third best-selling book in the United States that year.
  • The circulating wording does not match. Wikiquote ↗ correctly credits the line to The Woman of Andros (1930) but prints the plural “treasures” — a form that appears nowhere in the novel’s full text.
Public domain

The Woman of Andros was first published in February 1930 by Albert & Charles Boni in New York, and works published in the United States before 1931 are now in the public domain there. Project Gutenberg ↗ confirms the status directly, listing the book as “Public domain in the USA” and hosting the complete text. Readers outside the United States should check their own country’s term, which may still run from Wilder’s death in 1975.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

The credit is right. The wording is not.

This is the unusual case for a famous name: Wilder genuinely wrote the sentence, and a specialist society has pinned the page. What has gone wrong is the text itself — twice over. The version that circulates is not what the novel says, and the version in this page’s own headline is not what circulates.

“…conscious of our treasures” (plural) Mis-worded

By far the dominant form online — it is what Wikiquote ↗, PassItOn ↗ and Good News Network ↗ all print. A full-text search of the novel on Project Gutenberg ↗ returns no instance of the plural “our treasures” anywhere in the book. Wilder wrote the singular.

“alive in the moments” Mis-worded

The variant in this page’s own headline — and, unlike the plural, one we cannot find in circulation anywhere. Every reprint we checked prints “in those moments”: Wikiquote ↗, PassItOn ↗ and Good News Network ↗, plus Goodreads, BrainyQuote, QuoteFancy, LibQuotes and philosiblog. So this is not a rival version doing the rounds; it is a further slip on top of the popular one, and we keep the page keyed to it so that anyone who arrives carrying this wording lands on the correction. Wilder’s sentence reads “alive in those moments” — the demonstrative matters, because it points back to the specific instants of recognition the fable has just described. The phrase “in the moments when” does not appear in the novel at all.

The half-sentence version Shortened

Every popular reprint stops at “treasure(s)” and drops Wilder’s continuation, “for our hearts are not strong enough to love every moment.” The Thornton Wilder Society ↗ notes explicitly that the commonly cited version is a shortened form of the fuller passage. The cut turns a bleak observation about human limits into an inspirational slogan.

Quote-of-the-day sites Unsourced

Neither PassItOn ↗ nor Good News Network ↗ names the work the line comes from — they credit “Thornton Wilder” and stop. That is how the wording drifted: with no source to check against, each reprint copies the last one.

Wilder’s actual sentence, on page 36 of the 1930 first edition and readable in full at Project Gutenberg ↗: “Suddenly the hero saw that the living too are dead and that we can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasure; for our hearts are not strong enough to love every moment.”

Context

Why it matters

The line is almost always reprinted as a standalone piece of gratitude wisdom — a Thanksgiving card sentiment. In the novel it is something colder and stranger. Chrysis, an educated courtesan on the fictional island of Brynos, tells her banquet guests a fable about a hero permitted to return from the dead for a single day of his own boyhood. He watches his mother work at her loom and his father cross the courtyard, and understands that he is looking at people who cannot see what they have.

The sentence is the hero’s realisation, and Wilder immediately undercuts any comfort in it: “for our hearts are not strong enough to love every moment.” That second clause — the part the greeting-card version always cuts — is the whole point. Wilder is not saying be grateful; he is saying that continuous attention is beyond human capacity, and that most of living is therefore a kind of death.

The clause everyone drops is the one that makes it Wilder: “for our hearts are not strong enough to love every moment.”

The passage Wilder rewrote eight years later

Readers of Our Town will recognise the scene. The Thornton Wilder Society notes that this moment in The Woman of Andros foreshadows Emily’s wish, in Wilder’s later play, to return to an ordinary day of her own life — and her discovery that the living go about their business without looking at one another.

The Woman of Andros was published in February 1930 and was the third best-selling book in America that year. It was also the book that ended Wilder’s critical honeymoon: Michael Gold used it to accuse him of retreating into antiquity while the Depression unfolded. Wilder’s answer, in effect, is on page 36 — the emotions he was chasing were the ones no era escapes.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Gratitude Time Happiness

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Wilder Queries: Exploring Quotations #1twildersociety.org

The Thornton Wilder Society’s own source-identification for this exact quotation — work, speaker, scene, page in the HarperCollins reprint, and a note that the circulating version is a shortened form.
The Woman of Andros — full text (eBook #78024)gutenberg.org

The complete 1930 novel, free and public domain in the USA. The sentence appears on page 36 of the first edition; search the text for “conscious of our treasure.”
The Woman of Andros — work pagetwildersociety.org

Publication date (21 February 1930, Albert & Charles Boni), plot, Chrysis as a Socratic mentor figure, reception and the Michael Gold controversy.
Thornton Wilderen.wikiquote.org

Lists the quotation among Wilder’s sourced quotes and credits it to The Woman of Andros (1930) — though it prints the plural “treasures.”
The Woman of Andros (1930) — scanned editionarchive.org

A scanned 1930 edition of the novel in the Internet Archive, for readers who want to see the page rather than a transcription.
Thornton Wilderen.wikipedia.org

Biography: life dates, and his Pulitzer Prizes for The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth.

The real author

About Thornton Wilder

Thornton Wilder

1897–1975 · American novelist and playwright · three Pulitzer Prizes

Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) is the rare American writer who won the Pulitzer Prize in both fiction and drama — for the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and later for the plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth. The Woman of Andros, his third novel, set an ancient Greek island against a pre-Christian moral world and became the third best-selling book in the United States in 1930. It also drew the first serious critical backlash of his career, when the Marxist critic Michael Gold attacked him for writing about antiquity while Americans went unemployed.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Thornton Wilder, The Woman of Andros (New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1930), 36.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘We can only be said to be alive in the moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasure’?” Last verified 8 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/we-can-only-be-said-to-be-alive-in-the-moments-when-our/

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