James Thurber quotes

Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.
-- James Thurber

#Funny #Witty #Maturity

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
-- James Thurber

#Love #Life #Relationship

All men should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why.
-- James Thurber

#Running #Humor #Learning

Two is company, four is a party, three is a crowd. One is a wanderer.
-- James Thurber

#Party #Two #Three

I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.
-- James Thurber

#Love #Life #Relationship

Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
-- James Thurber

#Love #Inspirational #Life

If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
-- James Thurber

#Dog #Nature #Animal

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.
-- James Thurber

#Humor #Artist #Depth

But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?
-- James Thurber

#Death #Dream #Fear

Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear end collision.
-- James Thurber

#Travel #Airplane #Men

I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance - a sharp, vindictive glance.
-- James Thurber

#Dog #Cat #Men

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.
-- James Thurber

#Men #Animal #Law

Boys are beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years.
-- James Thurber

#Thank You #Children #Baby Boy

There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.
-- James Thurber

#Inspirational #Life #Light

Love is what you've been through with somebody.
-- James Thurber

#Love #Marriage #Drinking

One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough.
-- James Thurber

#Drinking #Beer #Two

Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
-- James Thurber

#Inspirational #Humor #Emotional

The most dangerous food is wedding cake.
-- James Thurber

#Wedding #Food #Cake

There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.
-- James Thurber

#Funny #Witty #Numbers

Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.
-- James Thurber

#Kindness #Thinking #Confusion

The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.
-- James Thurber

#Past #Sound #Comedy

Unless artists can remember what it was to be a little boy, they are only half complete as artist and as man.
-- James Thurber

#Art #Men #Boys

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.
-- James Thurber

#Wake Up #Sneezing #Allergies

With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.
-- James Thurber

#Birthday #Sarcastic #Writing

Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.
-- James Thurber

#Fear #Men #Desperation

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.
-- James Thurber

#Dog #Successful #Animal

Time is for dragonflies and angels. The former live too little and the latter live too long.
-- James Thurber

#Time #Angel #Long

Sophistication might be described as the ability to cope gracefully with a situation involving the presence of a formidable menace to one's poise and prestige (such as the butler, or the man under the bed - but never the husband).
-- James Thurber

#Husband #Men #Might

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.
-- James Thurber

#Method #Opening #Sentences

Let me be the first to admit that the naked truth about me is to the naked truth about Salvador Dali as an old ukulele in the attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts. Senor Dali has the jump on me from the beginning. He remembers and describes in detail what it was like in the womb. My own earliest memory is of accompanying my father to a polling booth in Columbus, Ohio, where he voted for William McKinley.
-- James Thurber

#Memories #Father #Mean

All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.
-- James Thurber

#Hate #Men #Firsts

Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?
-- James Thurber

#Investing #Nonconformist #Nonconformity

A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption.
-- James Thurber

#Drawing #Levels #Caption

A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make sense.
-- James Thurber

#Wise #Wisdom #Wise Words

He who hesitates is sometimes saved.
-- James Thurber

#Sometimes #Indecision

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.
-- James Thurber

#Nature #Fun #People

There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception.
-- James Thurber

#Yoga #Exception

Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?
-- James Thurber

#Funny #Hilarious #Witty

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.
-- James Thurber

#Thinking #Numbers #Years

For one thing, she pronounced flowers 'flars' and I couldn't let it slide.
-- James Thurber

#Flower #Slides

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.
-- James Thurber

#Lonely #Men #Age

You are all a lost generation," Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night.
-- James Thurber

#Home #Night #Gertrude

Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.
-- James Thurber

#Death #Desire #Inability

Youcanfooltoomanyofthepeopletoomuchofthetime. See Lincoln 510:35.
-- James Thurber

#Time

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.
-- James Thurber

#Life #Death #Simple

Remember laughter. You'll need it even in the blessed isles of Ever After.
-- James Thurber

#Laughter #Blessed #Needs

She wasn't much to look at but she was something to think about.
-- James Thurber

#Thinking #Looks

When man gives up on reforming and inspiring society he also gives up his freedom.
-- James Thurber

#Giving Up #Freedom #Men

Beautiful things don't ask for attention.
-- James Thurber

#Beautiful #Attention #Beautiful Things

Salvador [Dali] was brought up in Spain, a country colored by the legends of Hannibal, El Greco, and Cervantes. I was brought up in Ohio, a region steeped in the tradition of Coxey's Army, the Anti-Saloon League, and William Howard Taft.
-- James Thurber

#Country #Army #Ohio

What would you do without me? Say 'nothing.'" "Nothing," said the Prince. "Good. Then you're helpless and I'll help you.
-- James Thurber

#Helping #Said #Helpless

I make mistakes, but I am on the side of Good," the Golux said, "by accident and happenchance. I had high hopes of being Evil when I was two, but in my youth I came upon a firefly burning in a spider's web. I saved the victim's life." "The firefly's ?" said the minstrel. "The spider's. The blinking arsonist had set the web on fire.
-- James Thurber

#Mistake #Firefly #Two

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.
-- James Thurber

#Sorry #Heart #Firsts

Mutual suspicions of mental inadequacy are common during the first year of any marriage.
-- James Thurber

#Years #Firsts #Common

It was Lisa, aged five, whose mother asked her to thank my wife for the peas we had sent them from our garden. 'I thought the peas were awful, I wish you and Mrs. Thurber were dead, and I hate trees,' said Lisa.
-- James Thurber

#Mother #Hate #Garden

Authors of light pieces have, nobody knows why, a genius for getting into minor difficulties: they walk into the wrong apartments, they drink furniture polish for stomach bitters, they drive their cars into the prize tulip beds of haughty neighbors, they playfully slap gangsters, mistaking them for old school friends.
-- James Thurber

#School #Light #Car

Art – the one achievement of man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised
-- James Thurber

#Art #Men #Long

I loathe the expression “What makes him tick.” It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solutions, 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.
-- James Thurber

#Fall #Simple #Expression

The appreciative smile, the chuckle, the soundless mirth, so important to the success of comedy, cannot be understood unless one sits among the audience and feels the warmth created by the quality of laughter that the audience takes home with it.
-- James Thurber

#Happiness #Success #Laughter

You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.
-- James Thurber

#Inspirational #Funny #Fall

The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.
-- James Thurber

#Differences #Apathy #Comedy

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.
-- James Thurber

#Truth #Simple #Men

It's a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.
-- James Thurber

#Wine #Thinking #Comedy

Discussion in America means dissent.
-- James Thurber

#Mean #America #Comedy

There is something about a poet which leads us to believe that he died, in many cases, as long as 20 years before his birth.
-- James Thurber

#Believe #Years #Long

Progress was all right. Only it went on too long.
-- James Thurber

#Funny #Witty #Humorous

Last night I dreamed of a small consolation enjoyed only by the blind: Nobody knows the trouble I've not seen!
-- James Thurber

#Night #Lasts #Blind

The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.
-- James Thurber

#Taste #Comedy #Dignity

It had only one fault. It was kind of lousy.
-- James Thurber

#Kindness #Faults #Kind

The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself.
-- James Thurber

#Fun #World #Sense Of Humor

These are the days of bootleg love.
-- James Thurber

Quick, name some towns in New Jersey
-- James Thurber

#Names #Towns #Jersey

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.
-- James Thurber

#Sleep #Average #Two

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.
-- James Thurber

#Native American #Rewards #Comedy

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.
-- James Thurber

#Witty #Stupid #Trying

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.
-- James Thurber

#Lying #Expression #Giving

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.
-- James Thurber

#Humor #Thinking #Hair