Notice: ob_end_flush(): Failed to delete and flush buffer. No buffer to delete or flush in /home1/ntptuqmy/public_html/quotes/includes/header_html.php on line 6
James Thurber Quotes - IQDb - Internet Quotes Database

Quotes from James Thurber


Sorted by Popularity


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.


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


Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy, wealthy, and dead.


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


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


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.


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


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


He who hesitates is sometimes saved.


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.


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.


We all have faults, and mine is being wicked.


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.


Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.


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.


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.


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.


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.


There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.


You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.