Quotes by Thurber, James

"While he was not as dumb as an ox, he was not any smarter either."

Thurber, James on character   

"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."

Thurber, James on theater   

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

Thurber, James on travel   

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

Thurber, James on wine   

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

Thurber, James on wisdom   

"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."

Thurber, James on wit   

"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."

Thurber, James on world   

"Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober."

Thurber, James on writers and writing   

"When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare."

Thurber, James on writers and writing   

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

Thurber, James on comedy and comedians   

"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."

Thurber, James on comedy and comedians   

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

Thurber, James on conflict   

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

Thurber, James on conformity   

"Philosophy offers the rather cold consolation that perhaps we and our planet do not actually exist; religion presents the contradictory and scarcely more comforting thought that we exist but that we cannot hope to get anywhere until we cease to exist. Alcohol, in attempting to resolve the contradiction, produces vivid patterns of Truth which vanish like snow in the morning sun and cannot be recalled; the revelations of poetry are as wonderful as a comet in the skies -- and as mysterious. Love, which was once believed to contain the Answer, we now know to be nothing more than an inherited behavior pattern."

Thurber, James on cosmos