110+ James Thurber Quotes On Education, Friendship And Death

James Thurber was an American humorist, cartoonist, and writer. He was best known for his cartoons and short stories published in The New Yorker magazine. He is also known for his humorous autobiographical works such as The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Following is our collection on famous quotes by James Thurber on education, life, love.

Top 10 James Thurber Quotes

1. Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness.
2. There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.
3. It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
4. All men should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why.
5. But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?
6. Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.
7. Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
8. The most dangerous food is wedding cake.
9. Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
10. 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 Image Quotes

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers. — James Thurber

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

Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility. — James Thurber

The most dangerous food is wedding cake. — James Thurber

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

James Thurber Short Quotes

• The unicorn is a mythical beast.
• A false or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act.
• Two is company, four is a party, three is a crowd. One is a wanderer.
• One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough.
• There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception.
• A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make sense.
• Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?
• Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.
• Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?
• The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.

James Thurber Quotes About Life

Beautiful things don't ask for attention. — James Thurber

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. — James Thurber

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. — James Thurber

The trouble with the lost generation is that it didn't get lost enough. — James Thurber

Let the meek inherit the earth -- they have it coming to them. — James Thurber

Don't get it right, just get it written. — James Thurber

James Thurber Quotes About Love

Love is what you've been through with somebody. — James Thurber

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'. — James Thurber

Love is blind, but desire just doesn't give a good goddamn — James Thurber

Love is the strange bewilderment that overtakes one person on account of another person. — James Thurber

I love the idea of there being two sexes, don't you? — James Thurber

These are the days of bootleg love. — James Thurber

James Thurber Quotes About Death

We all know that the theater and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theater, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves. — James Thurber

Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street. — James Thurber

Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead. — James Thurber

God bless... God damn. — James Thurber

James Thurber Quotes About Say

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

I never quite know when I'm not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, "Dammit, Thurber, stop writing." She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. — James Thurber

What would you do without me? Say 'nothing.'" "Nothing," said the Prince. "Good. Then you're helpless and I'll help you. — James Thurber

James Thurber Quotes About Humorous

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

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. — James Thurber

The things we laugh at are awful while they are going on, but get funny when we look back. And other people laugh because they've been through it too. The closest thing to humor is tragedy. — 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

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

The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself. — James Thurber

I write humor the way a surgeon operates, because it is a livelihood, because I have a great urge to do it, because many interesting challenges are set up, and because I have the hope it may do some good. — 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

I was seized by the stern hand of Compulsion, that dark, unreasonable Urge that impels women to clean house in the middle of the night. — James Thurber

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

James Thurber Quotes About Years

I have lived in the East for nearly thirty years now, but many of my books prove that I am never very far away from Ohio in my thoughts, and that the clocks that strike in my dreams are often the clocks of Columbus. — James Thurber

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

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober. — James Thurber

Mutual suspicions of mental inadequacy are common during the first year of any marriage. — James Thurber

There is something about a poet which leads us to believe that he died, in many cases, as long as 20 years before his birth. — James Thurber

The whole of Paris is a vast university of Art, Literature and Music... it is worth anyone's while to dally here for years. Paris is a seminar, a post-graduate course in everything. — James Thurber

I'm sixty-five and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics, but if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be forty-eight. — James Thurber

Women deserve to have more than 12 years between 28 and 40. — James Thurber

James Thurber Quotes About Persons

If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons. — 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

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. — James Thurber

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. — James Thurber

James Thurber Famous Quotes And Sayings

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers. — James Thurber

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

Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility. — James Thurber

I used to wake up at 4 A.M. and start sneezing, sometimes for five hours. I tried to find out what sort of allergy I had but finally came to the conclusion that it must be an allergy to consciousness. — James Thurber

The most dangerous food is wedding cake. — James Thurber

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

I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance - a sharp, vindictive glance. — James Thurber

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. — James Thurber

It's a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption. — 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 laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms -hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal. — James Thurber

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. — James Thurber

Reason is 6/7 of treason. — James Thurber

Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation. — James Thurber

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

He who hesitates is sometimes saved. — James Thurber

A pinch of probability is worth a pound of perhaps. — James Thurber

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

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). — James Thurber

When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare. — James Thurber

It is better to have loafed and lost than never to have loafed at all. — James Thurber

There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else. — James Thurber

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). — James Thurber

Discussion in America means dissent. — 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

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. — James Thurber

This is the posture of fortunes slave: one foot in the gravy, one foot in the grave. — James Thurber

There are two kinds of light -- the glow that illumines, and the glare that obscures. — James Thurber

Unless artists can remember what it was to be a little boy, they are only half complete as artist and as man. — James Thurber

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. — James Thurber

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. — James Thurber

Remember laughter. You'll need it even in the blessed isles of Ever After. — James Thurber

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

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

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

Salvador [Dali] was brought up in Spain, a country colored by the legends of Hannibal, El Greco, and Cervantes. I was brought up in Ohio, a region steeped in the tradition of Coxey's Army, the Anti-Saloon League, and William Howard Taft. — James Thurber

Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other — James Thurber

I make mistakes, but I am on the side of Good," the Golux said, "by accident and happenchance. I had high hopes of being Evil when I was two, but in my youth I came upon a firefly burning in a spider's web. I saved the victim's life." "The firefly's ?" said the minstrel. "The spider's. The blinking arsonist had set the web on fire. — James Thurber

Why do you have to a nonconformist like everybody else? — James Thurber

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

Man is troubled by what might be called the Dog Wish, a strange and involved compulsion to be as happy and carefree as a dog — James Thurber

In the pathways between office and home and home and the houses of settled people there are always, ready to snap at you, the little perils of routine living, but there is no escape in the unplanned tangent, the sudden turn. — James Thurber

You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward. — James Thurber

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. — James Thurber

Sanity, soundness, and sincerity, of which gleams and strains can still be found in the human brain under powerful microscopes, flourish only in a culture of clarification, which is now becoming harder and harder to detect with the naked eye. — James Thurber

Last night I dreamed of a small consolation enjoyed only by the blind: Nobody knows the trouble I've not seen! — James Thurber

It takes that je ne sais quoi which we call sophistication for a woman to be magnificent in a drawing-room when her faculties have departed but she herself has not yet gone home. — 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

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. — James Thurber

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time. — James Thurber

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

The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms — James Thurber

It had only one fault. It was kind of lousy. — James Thurber

A wet dog is lovingest. — James Thurber

Looks can be deceiving; it's eating that's believing. — James Thurber

You are all a lost generation," Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night. — James Thurber

I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age. — James Thurber

Though statisticians in our time have never kept the score, Man wants a great deal here below and Woman even more. — James Thurber

Surely no other American institution is so bound around and tightened up by rules, strictures, adages, and superstitions as the Broadway theatre. — James Thurber

It was Lisa, aged five, whose mother asked her to thank my wife for the peas we had sent them from our garden. 'I thought the peas were awful, I wish you and Mrs. Thurber were dead, and I hate trees,' said Lisa. — James Thurber

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. — James Thurber

He was always leaning forward, pushing something invisible ahead of him. — James Thurber

We all have faults, and mine is being wicked. — James Thurber

Life Lessons by James Thurber

1. James Thurber taught us to find humor in everyday life, no matter how difficult the situation may be. He showed us that humor can be a great tool for coping with life's challenges.
2. He also taught us to never give up, no matter how many times we fail. His own career was full of rejections and disappointments, but he kept going and eventually achieved success.
3. Lastly, he showed us that it is important to be creative and to always strive to be unique. He was an incredibly imaginative writer and artist, and his works are still inspiring people today.