Top 160 James Thurber Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “A pinch of probability is worth a pound of perhaps.”

— James Thurber

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

— James Thurber

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

— James Thurber

54. “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

55. “I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand.”

— James Thurber

56. “The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.”

— James Thurber

57. “Somebody has said that woman’s place is in the wrong. That’s fine. What the wrong needs is a woman’s presence and a woman’s touch. She is far better equipped than men to set it right.”

— James Thurber

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

— James Thurber

59. “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

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

60. “I myself have known some profoundly thoughtful dogs.”

— James Thurber

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

— James Thurber

62. “The Old Man ain’t afraid of hell.”

— James Thurber

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

— James Thurber

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

— James Thurber

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

— James Thurber

66. “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

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

— James Thurber

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

— James Thurber

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

— James Thurber

70. “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

71. “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

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

— James Thurber

73. “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

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

— James Thurber

75. “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

76. “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

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

— James Thurber

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

— James Thurber

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

— James Thurber

80. “Though statisticians in our time have never kept the score, Man wants a great deal here below and Woman even more.”

— James Thurber

81. “Love is blind, but desire just doesn’t give a good goddamn.”

— James Thurber

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

— James Thurber

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

83. “Man has always assumed that his is the highest form of life in the universe. There is, of course, nothing at all with which to sustain this view.”

— James Thurber

84. “Laugh and the world laughs with you, love and you love alone.”

— James Thurber

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

— James Thurber

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

— James Thurber

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

— James Thurber

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

— James Thurber

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

— James Thurber

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

— James Thurber

91. “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

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

— James Thurber

93. “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

94. “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

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

— James Thurber

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

— James Thurber

97. “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

98. “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

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

— James Thurber

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

— James Thurber