Top 160 James Thurber Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “I don’t understand,” said the scientist, “why you lemmings all rush down to the sea and drown yourselves.” “How curious,” said the lemming. “The one thing I don’t understand is why you human beings don’t.”

— James Thurber

53. “The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.”

— James Thurber

54. “For one thing, she pronounced flowers ‘flars’ and I couldn’t let it slide.”

— James Thurber

55. “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

56. “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

57. “Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.”

— James Thurber

58. “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

59. “So much has already been written about everything that you can’t find out anything about it.”

— James Thurber

60. “The jewels of sorrow last forever.”

— James Thurber

61. “Time is for dragonflies and angels. The former live too little and the latter live too long.”

— James Thurber

62. “He knows all about art, but he doesn’t know what he likes.”

— James Thurber

63. “A pinch of probability is worth a pound of perhaps.”

— James Thurber

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

— James Thurber

65. “The most dangerous food is wedding cake.”

— James Thurber

66. “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

67. “Women deserve to have more than 12 years between 28 and 40.”

— James Thurber

68. “She wasn’t much to look at but she was something to think about.”

— James Thurber

69. “A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn’t make sense.”

— James Thurber

70. “I can feel a thing I cannot touch and touch a thing I cannot feel. The first is sad and sorry, the second is your heart.”

— James Thurber

71. “If you are a police dog, where’s your badge?”

— James Thurber

72. “There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.”

— James Thurber

73. “A burden in the bush is worth two on your hands.”

— James Thurber

74. “Where most of us end up there is no knowing, but the hellbent get where they are going.”

— James Thurber

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

— James Thurber

76. “Columbus is a town in which almost anything is likely to happen, and in which almost everything has.”

— James Thurber

77. “I hate women because they have brought into the currency of our language such expressions as “all righty” and “yes indeedy” and hundreds of others.”

— James Thurber

78. “Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.”

— James Thurber

79. “We all have faults, and mine is being wicked.”

— James Thurber

80. “Last night I dreamed of a small consolation enjoyed only by the blind: Nobody knows the trouble I’ve not seen!”

— James Thurber

81. “The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms -hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.”

— James Thurber

82. “I love the idea of there being two sexes, don’t you?”

— James Thurber

83. “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

84. “These are the days of bootleg love.”

— James Thurber

85. “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

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

— James Thurber

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “Progress was all right. Only it went on too long.”

— James Thurber

91. “This is the posture of fortunes slave: one foot in the gravy, one foot in the grave.”

— James Thurber

92. “Let the meek inherit the earth – they have it coming to them.”

— James Thurber

93. “I don’t remember any blue poodles.”

— James Thurber

94. “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

95. “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

96. “My drawings have been described as pre-internationalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point.”

— James Thurber

97. “The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself.”

— James Thurber

98. “Muggs was always sorry, Mother said, when he bit someone, but we could never understand how she figured this out. He didn’t act sorry.”

— James Thurber

99. “Laughter need not be cut out of anything, since it improves everything.”

— James Thurber

100. “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