James Thurber – 20 Quotes

20 Quotes by James Thurber

Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man.

– James Thurber

Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.

– James Thurber

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.

– James Thurber

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

– James Thurber

The most dangerous food is wedding cake.

– James Thurber

Progress was all right. Only it went on too long.

– James Thurber

Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?

– James Thurber

The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody’s guess.

– James Thurber

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.

– James Thurber

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.

– James Thurber

Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.

– James Thurber

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.

– James Thurber

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.

– James Thurber

Love is what you’ve been through with somebody.

– James Thurber

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

– James Thurber

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.

– James Thurber

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.

– James Thurber

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

– James Thurber

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.

– James Thurber

Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.

– James Thurber