Famous James Thurber Quotations

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"The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel."
by James Thurber
"Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility."
by James Thurber
"It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers."
by James Thurber
"Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness."
by James Thurber
"I hate women because they always know where things are."
by James Thurber
"Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone"
by James Grover Thurber
"You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward."
by James Grover Thurber
"You can fool too many of the people too much of the time."
by James Grover Thurber
"Boys are beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years."
by James Grover Thurber
"He who hesitates is sometimes saved."
by James Thurber
"A husband should not insult his wife publicly, at parties. He should insult her in the privacy of the home."
by James Thurber
"All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why."
by James Thurber
"All men should strive to learn before they die What they are running from, and to, and why."
by James Grover Thurber
"All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first."
by James Grover Thurber
"But those rare souls whose spirit gets magically into the hearts of men, leave behind them something more real and warmly personal than bodily presence, an ineffable and eternal thing. It is everlasting life touching us as something more than a vague, recondite concept. The sound of a great name dies like an echo the splendor of fame fades into nothing but the grace of a fine spirit pervades the places through which it has passed, like the haunting loveliness of mignonette."
by James Grover Thurber
"Early to rise and early to bed Makes a male healthy, wealthy and dead"
by James Thurber
"Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead."
by James Thurber
"He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes."
by James Thurber
"Her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house."
by James Thurber
"Human Dignity has gleamed only now and then and here and there, in lonely splendor, throughout the ages, a hope of the better men, never an achievement of the majority."
by James Thurber
"I do not have a psychiatrist and I do not want one, for the simple reason that if he listened to me long enough, he might become disturbed."
by James Thurber
"I loathe the expression What makes him tick. It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm."
by James Thurber
"I loathe the expression 'What makes him tick.' It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm."
by James Thurber
"I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere."
by James Thurber
"I used to wake up at 4 A.M. and start sneezing, sometimes for five hours. I tried to find out what sort of allergy I had but finally came to the conclusion that it must be an allergy to consciousness."
by James Thurber
"I'm 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be 48. That's the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40."
by James Grover Thurber
"If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons."
by James Grover Thurber
"It had only one fault. It was kind of lousy."
by James Thurber
"It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers."
by James Grover Thurber
"Its better to know some of the questions, than all of the answers."
by James Thurber
"Let us not look back in anger, or forward in fear, but around us in awareness."
by James Thurber
"Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness."
by James Thurber
"Love is what you've been through with somebody."
by James Grover Thurber
"Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation."
by James Thurber
"One has but to observe a community of beavers at work in a stream to understand the loss in his sagacity, balance, cooperation, competence, and purpose which Man has suffered since he rose up on his hind legs.... He began to chatter and he developed Reason, Thought, and Imagination, qualities which would get the smartest group of rabbits or orioles in the world into inextricable trouble overnight."
by James Grover Thurber
"Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other."
by James Grover Thurber
"The difference between our decadence and the Russians' is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic."
by James Grover Thurber
"The dog has seldom been successful in pulling man up to its level of sagacity, but man has frequently dragged the dog down to his."
by James Grover Thurber
"The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself."
by James Thurber
"The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people--that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature."
by James Thurber
"The wit makes fun of other persons the satirist makes fun of the world the humorist makes fun of himself."
by James Thurber
"The wit makes fun of other persons the satirist makes fun of the world the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people--that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature."
by James Thurber
"There are two kinds of light--the glow that illumines, and the glare that obscures."
by James Thurber
"There are two kinds of light--the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures."
by James Thurber
"There are two kinds of light -- the glow that illumines, and the glare that obscures."
by James Thurber
"There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else."
by James Thurber
"Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?"
by James Thurber
"While he was not dumber than an ox he was not any smarter either."
by James Thurber
"Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?"
by James Thurber
"With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs."
by James Grover Thurber
"Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised."
by James Thurber
"A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption."
by James Thurber
"My drawings have been described as pre-internationalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point."
by James Thurber
"He was always leaning forward, pushing something invisible ahead of him."
by James Thurber
"While he was not as dumb as an ox, he was not any smarter either."
by James Thurber
"Comedy has to be done en clair. You can't blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear."
by James Thurber
"Why do you have to a nonconformist like everybody else?"
by James Thurber
"Discussion in America means dissent."
by James Thurber
"A peril of the night road is that flecks of dust and streaks of bug blood on the windshield look to me like old admirals in uniform, or crippled apple women, or the front edge of barges, and I whirl out of their way, thus going into ditches and fields and up on front lawns, endangering the life of authentic admirals and apple women who may be out on the roads for a breath of air before retiring."
by James Thurber
"The animals that depend on instinct have an inherent knowledge of the laws of economics and of how to apply them; Man, with his powers of reason, has reduced economics to the level of a farce which is at once funnier and more tragic than Tobacco Road."
by James Thurber
"Speed is scarcely the noblest virtue of graphic composition, but it has its curious rewards. There is a sense of getting somewhere fast, which satisfies a native American urge."
by James Thurber
"One has but to observe a community of beavers at work in a stream to understand the loss in his sagacity, balance, co-operation, competence, and purpose which Man has suffered since he rose up on his hind legs. He began to chatter and he developed Reason, Thought, and Imagination, qualities which would get the smartest group of rabbits or orioles in the world into inextricable trouble overnight."
by James Thurber
"Humor does not include sarcasm, invalid irony, sardonicism, innuendo, or any other form of cruelty. When these things are raised to a high point they can become wit, but unlike the French and the English, we have not been much good at wit since the days of Benjamin Franklin."
by James Thurber
"The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people --that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature."
by James Thurber
"My opposition To Interviews lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language."
by James Thurber
"The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms"
by James Thurber
"In an extensive reading of recent books by psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and inspirationalists, I have discovered that they all suffer from one or more of these expression-complexes: italicizing, capitalizing, exclamation-pointing, multiple-interrogating, and itemizing. These are all forms of what the psychos themselves would call, if they faced their condition frankly, Rhetorical-Over-Compensation."
by James Thurber
"I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method."
by James Thurber
"But those rare souls whose spirit gets magically into the hearts of men, leave behind them something more real and warmly personal than bodily presence, an ineffable and eternal thing. It is everlasting life touching us as something more than a vague, recondite concept. The sound of a great name dies like an echo; the splendor of fame fades into nothing; but the grace of a fine spirit pervades the places through which it has passed, like the haunting loveliness of mignonette."
by James Thurber
"If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps."
by James Thurber
"Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear end collision."
by James Thurber
"It's a na?ve domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption."
by James Thurber
"Next to reasoning, the greatest handicap to the optimum development of Man lies in the fact that this planet is just barely habitable. Its minimum temperatures are too low, and its maximum temperatures too high. Its day is not long enough, and its night is too long. The disposition of its water and earth is distinctly unfortunate (the existence of the Mediterranean Sea in the place where we find it is perhaps the unhappiest accident in the whole firmament). These factors encourage depression, fear, war, and lack of vitality. They describe a planet, which is by no means perfectly devised for the nurturing or for the perpetuation of a higher intelligence."
by James Thurber
"Art—the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised."
by James Thurber
"But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?"
by James Thurber
"The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies him..."
by James Thurber


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