Quotes by James Thurber

James Thurber

James Thurber

American cartoonist

Lived from: 1894 - 1961

Category: Artists Country: FlagUnited States

Born: 8 december 1894 Died: 2 november 1961

Quotes 21 till 40 of 47.

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  • It is better to have loafed and lost than never to have loafed at all.
    ― James Thurber
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  • It takes that je ne sais quoi which we call sophistication for a woman to be magnificent in a drawing-room when her faculties have departed but she herself has not yet gone home.
    ― James Thurber
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  • It's a naïve domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.
    ― James Thurber
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  • It's better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
    ― James Thurber
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  • Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness.
    ― James Thurber
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  • Love is the strange bewilderment that overtakes one person on account of another person.
    ― James Thurber
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  • Love is what you've been through with somebody.
    ― James Thurber
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  • Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear end collision.
    ― James Thurber
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  • 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
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  • My opposition [To Interviews] lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language.
    ― James Thurber
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  • Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.
    ― James Thurber
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  • Sophistication might be described as the ability to cope gracefully with a situation involving the presence of a formidable menace to one's poise and prestige (such as the butler, or the man under the bed - but never the husband).
    ― James Thurber
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  • 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
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  • 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.
    ― James Thurber
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  • The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.
    ― James Thurber
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  • The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms - hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.
    ― James Thurber
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  • The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.
    ― James Thurber
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  • 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.
    ― James Thurber
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  • There are two kinds of light - the glow that illumines, and the glare that obscures.
    ― James Thurber
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  • We all know that the theater and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theater, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves.
    ― James Thurber
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