Explore Quotes by James Thurber

Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.

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.

The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.

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.

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

It's a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

Discussion in America means dissent.

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

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

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.

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.

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

A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make sense.

Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?

There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.

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

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.

He who hesitates is sometimes saved.

There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception.

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

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