James Thurber Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by James Thurber
James Thurber Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from James Thurber on Wise Famous Quotes.
Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.
You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
Fables for Our Time, Moral of "The Owl Who Was God" (1940)
Fables for Our Time, Moral of "The Owl Who Was God" (1940)
Man is troubled by what might be called the Dog Wish, a strange and involved compulsion to be as happy and carefree as a dog.
To see things thousands of miles away, things hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come to, to draw closer, to see and be amazed.
I won't be listed and labeled or tabbed and tagged," said Clode. "If I want a book, I'll get a book.
Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear end collision.
Humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human character and achievement, inseparable.
Unless artists can remember what it was to be a little boy, they are only half complete as artist and as man.
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.
Last night I dreamed of a small consolation enjoyed only by the blind: Nobody knows the trouble I've not seen.
But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?
When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.
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.
To call such persons "humorists", a loose-fitting and ugly word, is to miss the nature of their dilemma and the dilemma of their nature.
With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.
Muggs was always sorry, Mother said, when he bit someone, but we could never understand how she figured this out. He didn't act sorry.
If I have sometimes seemed to make fun of Woman, I assure you it has only been for the purpose of egging her on.
A husband should not insult his wife publicly, at parties. He should insult her in the privacy of the home.
If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
Though statisticians in our time have never kept the score, Man wants a great deal here below and Woman even more.
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.
In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti.
At least she's not guilty of integrity, and that's more than I can say of any Bell in four generations except my grandfather and myself.
Let us not look back to the past with anger, nor towards the future with fear, but look around with awareness.
I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.
I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance - a sharp, vindictive glance.
Her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.
Man has always assumed that his is the highest form of life in the universe. There is, of course, nothing at all with which to sustain this view.
Lately, I have been wondering if there is time left for daydreaming in this 21st-century world of constant communication.
I'm sixty-five and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics, but if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be forty-eight.
The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.
Surely no other American institution is so bound around and tightened up by rules, strictures, adages, and superstitions as the Broadway theatre.
I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age.