James Thurber Quotes
You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.
Laughter need not be cut out of anything, since it improves everything.
There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception.
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.
He who hesitates is sometimes saved.
There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.
It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers.
Love is the strange bewilderment that overtakes one person on account of another person.
Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy, wealthy, and dead.
Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear end collision.
All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.
If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
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.
Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.
I hate women because they always know where things are.
There are two kinds of light - the glow that illumines, and the glare that obscures.
One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough.
The dog has got more fun out of Man than Man has got out of the dog, for the clearly demonstrable reason that Man is the more laughable of the two animals.
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.
The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.
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.
The paths of glory at least lead to the grave, but the paths of duty may not get you any where.
I can feel a thing I cannot touch and touch a thing I cannot feel. The first is sad and sorry, the second is your heart.
It is better to have loafed and lost, than never to have loafed at all.
The nation that complacently and fearfully allows its artists and writers to become suspected rather than respected is no longer regarded as a nation possessed with humor or depth.
You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.
Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.
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 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.
Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.
All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.
A pinch of probability is worth a pound of perhaps.
Unless artists can remember what it was to be a little boy, they are only half complete as artist and as man.
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...
Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?
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.
Every time is a time for comedy in a world of tension that would languish without it.
Humor is a serious thing. I like to think of it as one of our greatest earliest natural resources, which must be preserved at all cost.
But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?
A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make sense.
Man has gone long enough, or even too long, without being man enough to face the simple truth that the trouble with man is man.
Philosophy offers the rather cold consolation that perhaps we and our planet do not actually exist; religion presents the contradictory and scarcely more comforting thought that we exist but that we cannot hope to get anywhere until we cease to exist. Alcohol, in attempting to resolve the contradiction, produces vivid patterns of Truth which vanish like snow in the morning sun and cannot be recalled; the revelations of poetry are as wonderful as a comet in the skies - and as mysterious. Love, which was once believed to contain the Answer, we now know to be nothing more than an inherited behavior pattern.
Last night I dreamed of a small consolation enjoyed only by the blind: Nobody knows the trouble I've not seen!
All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.
The sanity of the average banquet speaker lasts about two and a half months; at the end of that time he begins to mutter to himself, and calls out in his sleep.
Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.
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.
Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.