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
Topics: Speed, Haste
This is the posture of fortune’s slaves: one foot in the gravy, one foot in the grave.
—James Thurber
Topics: Fortune
Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.
—James Thurber
Topics: Dying, Health, Death
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.
—James Thurber
Topics: Dogs
In an extensive reading of recent books by psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and inspirationalists, I have discovered that they all suffer from one or more of these expression-complexes: italicizing, capitalizing, exclamation-pointing, multiple-interrogating, and itemizing. These are all forms of what the psychos themselves would call, if they faced their condition frankly, Rhetorical-Over-Compensation.
—James Thurber
A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn’t make sense.
—James Thurber
Topics: Wisdom
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
Topics: Economics, Economy
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
Topics: Humor
Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.
—James Thurber
Topics: Silence
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
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
Topics: Wit, Comedy
Discussion in America means dissent.
—James Thurber
Topics: Dissent
It’s better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
—James Thurber
Topics: Thinking, Questioning, Questions
I love the idea of there being two sexes, don’t you?
—James Thurber
Topics: Men & Women, Men, Women
Art—the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.
—James Thurber
Topics: Arts, Artists, Art
We are a nation that has always gone in for the loud laugh, the wow, the yak, the belly laugh, and the dozen other labels for the roll- em-in-the-aisles gagerissimo. This is the kind of laugh that delights actors, directors, and producers, but dismays writers of comedy because it is the laugh that often dies in the lobby. 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
Topics: Laughter, Audiences
He who hesitates is sometimes saved.
—James Thurber
Topics: Indecision
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
Topics: Humor
Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.
—James Thurber
Topics: Thought, Thinking
It is a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you will be amused by its presumption.
—James Thurber
Topics: Wine
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
Topics: Language
A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption.
—James Thurber
Topics: Drawing, The Artist
Let us not look back to the past with anger, nor towards the future with fear, but look around with awareness
—James Thurber
Topics: Awareness
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
Topics: Dignity
The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.
—James Thurber
Topics: Comedy
In his grief over the loss of a dog. a little boy stands for the first time on tiptoe, peering into the rueful morrow of manhood.
—James Thurber
Why do you have to a nonconformist like everybody else?
—James Thurber
Topics: Conformity
The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms—hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.
—James Thurber
Topics: Laughter
Next to reasoning, the greatest handicap to the optimum development of Man lies in the fact that this planet is just barely habitable. Its minimum temperatures are too low, and its maximum temperatures too high. Its day is not long enough, and its night is too long. The disposition of its water and earth is distinctly unfortunate (the existence of the Mediterranean Sea in the place where we find it is perhaps the unhappiest accident in the whole firmament). These factors encourage depression, fear, war, and lack of vitality. They describe a planet, which is by no means perfectly devised for the nurturing or for the perpetuation of a higher intelligence.
—James Thurber
Topics: World
Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.
—James Thurber
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing, Writing
Precision of communication is important, more important than ever in our era of hair-trigger balances, when a false, or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act.
—James Thurber
Topics: Communication
It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
—James Thurber
Topics: Questions
I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.
—James Thurber
Topics: Books, Reading
There are two kinds of light—the glow that illumines, and the glare that obscures.
—James Thurber
Topics: Light
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
Topics: Wit, Humor
But those rare souls whose spirit gets magically into the hearts of men, leave behind them something more real and warmly personal than bodily presence, an ineffable and eternal thing. It is everlasting life touching us as something more than a vague, recondite concept. The sound of a great name dies like an echo; the splendor of fame fades into nothing; but the grace of a fine spirit pervades the places through which it has passed, like the haunting loveliness of mignonette.
—James Thurber
Topics: Spirit, Spirituality
You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.
—James Thurber
Topics: Persuasion, Risk, Balance
From now on, I think it is safe to predict, neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party will ever nominate for President a candidate without good looks, stage presence, theatrical delivery, and a sense of timing.
—James Thurber
Topics: Presidency
I’m 65 and I guess that puts me in the geriatrics. But if there were 15 months in the 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 12 years between the ages of 28 and 40.
—James Thurber
Topics: Aging, Age, Women
One has but to observe a community of beavers at work in a stream to understand the loss in his sagacity, balance, co-operation, competence, and purpose which Man has suffered since he rose up on his hind legs. He began to chatter and he developed Reason, Thought, and Imagination, qualities which would get the smartest group of rabbits or orioles in the world into inextricable trouble overnight.
—James Thurber
Topics: Humankind, Humanity