Words matter. These are the best James Thurber Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?
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).
Laughter need not be cut out of anything, since it improves everything.
Boys are beyond the range of anybody’s sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years.
The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.
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.
Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?
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.
All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.
It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
Discussion in America means dissent.
It is better to have loafed and lost, than never to have loafed at all.
But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?
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.
Love is the strange bewilderment that overtakes one person on account of another person.
I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance – a sharp, vindictive glance.
Love is what you’ve been through with somebody.
I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.
Last night I dreamed of a small consolation enjoyed only by the blind: Nobody knows the trouble I’ve not seen!
Progress was all right. Only it went on too long.
Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.
Unless artists can remember what it was to be a little boy, they are only half complete as artist and as man.
Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy, wealthy, and dead.
The most dangerous food is wedding cake.
You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
I hate women because they always know where things are.
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.
There are two kinds of light – the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.
All men should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why.
