Best 168 quotes of James Thurber on MyQuotes

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

A false or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act.

A husband should not insult his wife publicly, at parties. He should insult her in the privacy of the home.

A lady of 47 who has been married 27 years and has six children knows what love really is and once described it for me like this: 'Love is what you've been through with somebody'.

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

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

American girls often marry someone they can't stand to spite someone they can.

Americans want to go to heaven without dying.

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.

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

At forty my faculties may have closed up like flowers at evening, leaving me unable to write my memoirs with a fitting and discreet inaccuracy, or, having written them, unable to carry them to the publisher.

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.

A wet dog is lovingest.

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

Beautiful things don't ask for attention.

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

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.

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

(Cartoon caption:) I never really rallied after the birth of my first child.

Comedy has ceased to be a challenge to the mental processes. It has become a therapy of relaxation, a kind of tranquilizing drug.

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.

Discussion in America means dissent.

Dogs are obsessed with being happy.

Don't get it right, just get it written.

Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counselling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, 'How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?' and avoid 'How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?'

Every man is occasionally visited by the suspicion that the planet on which he is riding is not really going anywhere; that the Force which controls its measured eccentricities hasn't got anything special in mind. If he broods on this somber theme long enough he gets the doleful idea that the laughing children on a merry-go-round or the thin, fine hands of a lady's watch are revolving more purposely than he is.

Every time is a time for comedy in a world of tension that would languish without it. But I cannot confine myself to lightness in a period of human life that demands light. We all know that, as the old adage has it, "It is later than you think." But I also say occasionally: "It is lighter than you think." In this light let's not look back in anger, or forward in fear, but around in awareness.

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

God bless... God damn.

He had as much fun in the water as any person I have known. You didn't have to throw a stick in the water to get him to go in. Of course, he would bring back a stick to you if you did throw one in. He would even have brought back a piano if you had thrown one in.

He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes.

He who hesitates is sometimes saved.

History is replete with proofs, from Cato the Elder to Kennedy the Younger, that if you scratch a statesman you find an actor, but it is becoming harder and harder, in our time, to tell government from show business.

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.

Humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human character and achievement, inseparable.

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.

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.

Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.

Humourists lead... an existence of jumpiness and apprehension. They sit on the edge of the chair of Literature. In the house of Life they have the feeling that they have never taken off their overcoats.

Hundreds of hysterical persons must confuse these phenomena with messages from the beyond and take their glory to the bishop rather than the eye doctor.

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.

I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand.

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.

I don't believe the writer should know too much where he's going. If he does, he runs into old man blueprint—old man propaganda.

I don't remember any blue poodles.

I drew pictures rapidly and with few lines, because I had to write most of the pieces, too, and couldn't monkey long with the drawings. The divine urge was no higher than that.

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.

If I have sometimes seemed to make fun of Woman, I assure you it has only been for the purpose of egging her on.

If you are a police dog, where's your badge?