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Quotes by James Thurber

US author, cartoonist, humorist, & satirist (1894 - 1961)

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

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

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

CP 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.

CP It had only one fault. It was kind of lousy.

CP Its better to know some of the questions, than all of the answers.

CP Her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.

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

CP There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.

CP Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.

CP You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.

CP Early to rise and early to bed Makes a male healthy, wealthy and dead

CP It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.

CP I hate women because they always know where things are.

CP A husband should not insult his wife publicly, at parties. He should insult her in the privacy of the home.

CP A woman's place is in the wrong.

CP You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.

CP 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.

CP I loathe the expression "What makes him tick." It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm.

CP The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself.

CP He wondered if he would kiss her and when he would kiss her and if she wanted to be kissed and if she were thinking of it, but she asked him what he would have to eat tonight at his hotel. He said clam chowder. Thursday, he said, they always have clam chowder. Is that the way you know it's Thursday, she said, or is that the way you know it's clam chowder?

CP Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.

CP All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.

CP He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes.

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

CP 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.

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

CP 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.

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

CP Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.

CP He who hesitates is sometimes saved.

CP Let us not look back in anger, or forward in fear, but around us in awareness.

CP The paths of glory at least lead to the grave, but the paths of duty may not get you any where.