James Thurber Quotes
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Love is the strange bewilderment that overtakes one person on account of another person.
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Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear end collision.
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Humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human character and achievement, inseparable.
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Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy, wealthy, and dead.
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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.
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A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption.
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Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?
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Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
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We all have faults, and mine is being wicked.
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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.
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I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.
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I am not a dog lover. A dog lover to me means a dog that is in love with another dog.
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The most dangerous food is wedding cake.
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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.
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He picked out this sentence in a New Yorker casual of mine: 'After dinner, the men moved into the living room,' and he wanted to know why I, or the editors, had put in the comma. I could explain that one all night. I wrote back that this particular comma was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.
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One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough.
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You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
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All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.
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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.
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Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counseling 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?'
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It is better to have loafed and lost, than never to have loafed at all.
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Moral: Where most of us end up there is no knowing, but the hellbent get where they are going.
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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.
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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.