James Thurber Quotes
Most popular James Thurber Quotes
A woman's place is in the wrong.
Discussion in America means dissent.
He who hesitates is sometimes saved.
Love is what you've been through with somebody.
You can fool too many people, too much of the time.
Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquillity.
I hate women because they always know where things are.
You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes.
One is all right, two is too many, and three is not enough.
It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
It is better to have loafed and lost than never to have loafed at all.
Nostalgic reverie, like amorous fantasy, belongs in the category of escape.
There are two kinds of light—the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.
This is the posture of fortune's slave: one foot in the gravy, one foot in the grave.
Every time is a time for comedy in a world of tension that would languish without it.
All men should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.
Art—the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.
Look not to the future with fear, nor to the past with anger, but be in the present with awareness.
Men of all degrees should form this prudent habit: never serve a rabbit stew before you catch the rabbit.
Humor in a living culture must not be put away in the attic with the flag, but should be flaunted, like the flag, bravely.
The devoted writer of humor must continue to try to come as close to the truth as he can, even if he gets burned in the process.
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.
With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.
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.
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.
Humor does not include sarcasm, invalid irony, sardonicism, or any other form of cruelty. When these things are raised to a high point they can become wit.
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.
For some curious reason man has always assumed that he is the highest form of life in the Universe. There is, of course, nothing at all with which to sustain this view.
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.
Precision of communication is important, more important than ever, in our era of hair-trigger balances, when a false, or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act.
Having a manuscript under Ross's scrutiny was like putting your car in the hands of a skilled mechanic, not an automotive engineer with a bachelor of science degree, but a guy who knows what makes a motor go, and sputter, and wheeze, and sometimes comes to a dead stop; a man with an ear for the faintest body squeak as well as the loudest engine rattle.
They sit on the edge of literature. In the house of Life they have the feeling that they have never taken off their overcoats. Afraid of losing themselves in the larger flight of the two-volume novel, or even the one-volume novel, they stick to short accounts of their misadventures because they never get so deep into them that they feel they can get out.
It is better to have loafed and lost, than never to have loafed at all.
