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James Thurber

United States humorist and cartoonist who published collections of essays and stories (1894-1961)

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

– James Thurber

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

– James Thurber

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But what is all this fear of and opposition to Oblivion? What is the matter with the soft Darkness, the Dreamless Sleep?

– James Thurber

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

– James Thurber

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

– James Thurber

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

– James Thurber

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He who hesitates is sometimes saved.

– James Thurber

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

– James Thurber

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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.

– James Thurber

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Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.

– James Thurber

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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

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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

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I hate women because they always know where things are.

– James Thurber

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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.

– James Thurber

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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.

– James Thurber

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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.

– James Thurber

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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

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

– James Thurber

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

– James Thurber

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

– James Thurber

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

– James Thurber

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Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.

– James Thurber

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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.

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

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

– James Thurber

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

– James Thurber

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

– James Thurber

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Quotes from the news wire:

She can't recuse herself [if she becomes president], whether it influences her decision making is questionable, but it is a legitimate thing to focus on by her political opposition.

– James Thurber

Found on FOX News 9 years ago

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