James Thurber

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

James Grover Thurber (8 December 1894 - 2 November 1961) American humorist and cartoonist.

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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.
- Television interview with Edward R. Murrow

Her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.
- My Life and Hard Times (1933)

'Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?
- Cartoon caption, The New Yorker (5 June 1937)

There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.
- "The Fairly Intelligent Fly" The New Yorker (4 February 1939)

Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.
- "The Shrike and the Chipmunks", The New Yorker (18 February 1939) Because it is derived from Benjamin Franklin's famous saying this is often misquoted as: Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy, wealthy, and dead.

You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.
- "The Bear Who Let It Alone", The New Yorker (29 April 1939)

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
- "The Owl who was God", The New Yorker (29 April 1939)

Once upon a sunny morning a man who sat in a breakfast nook looked up from his scrambled eggs to see a white unicorn with a golden horn quietly cropping the roses in the garden. The man went up to the bedroom where his wife was still asleep and woke her. "There's a unicorn in the garden," he said. "Eating roses." She opened one unfriendly eye and looked at him. "The unicorn is a mythical beast," she said, and turned her back on him. The man walked slowly downstairs and out into the garden. The unicorn was still there; he was now browsing among the tulips.
- "The Unicorn in the Garden" from Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated (1940) ; this is a fable where a man sees a Unicorn in his garden, and his wife reports the matter to have him taken away, to the "booby-hatch". Online text with illustration by Thurber & Realplayer video of a 1953 adaptation

Don't count your boobies until they are hatched.
- "The Unicorn in the Garden" from Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated (1940)

He who hesitates is sometimes saved.
- "The Glass in the Field." from Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated (1940) ; this is a moral fable where several birds reject a Goldfinch's report that he ran into "crystalized air" while flying across a field, where workmen had left a large plate of glass upright. The Swallow rejects the offer to come along with others and prove the Goldfinch wrong.

The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.
- The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1942)

"To hell with the handkerchief," said Walter Mitty scornfully. He took one last drag on his cigarette and snapped it away. Then, with that faint, fleeting smile playing about his lips, he faced the firing squad; erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last.
- The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1942)

"Who are you?" the minstrel asked. "I am the Golux," said the Golux, proudly, "the only Golux in the world, and not a mere Device."
- The Thirteen Clocks (1951) page 32

Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.
- Further Fables for Our Time (1956); This statement is derived from one of Henry David Thoreau: The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

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.
- "Carpe Noctem, If You Can", Credos and Curios (1962)

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

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

A lady of forty-seven who had been married twenty-seven years and has six children knows what love really is and once described it for me like this: 'Love is what you've been through with somebody.'.

A pinch of probability is worth a pound of perhaps.

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

All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.
- This is derived from Oscar Wilde's statement "All men kill the thing they love..."

All men should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why.
- Variant: All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.

Art — the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Boys are beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and 90 years.

But those rare souls whose spirit gets magically into the hearts of men, leave behind them something more real and warmly personal than bodily presence, an ineffable and eternal thing. It is everlasting life touching us as something more than a vague, recondite concept. The sound of a great name dies like an echo; the splendor of fame fades into nothing; but the grace of a fine spirit pervades the places through which it has passed, like the haunting loveliness of mignonette.

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

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.

Discussion in America means dissent.

Don't get it right; get it written.
- Variant: Don't get it right, just get it written

Don't let that chip on your shoulder be your only reason for walking erect.

Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counseling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style? and avoid How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?

Every man is occasionally visited by the suspicion that the planet on which he is riding is not really going anywhere; that the Force which controls its measured eccentricities hasn't got anything special in mind. If he broods on this somber theme long enough he gets the doleful idea that the laughing children on a merry-go-round or the thin, fine hands of a lady's watch are revolving more purposely than he is.

From now on, I think it is safe to predict, neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party will ever nominate for President a candidate without good looks, stage presence, theatrical delivery, and a sense of timing.

From one casual of mine he picked this sentence. "After dinner, the men moved into the living room." I explained to the professor that this was Rose' way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up. There must, as we know, be a comma after every move, made by men, on this earth.

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

He was always leaning forward, pushing something invisible ahead of him.

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.

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.

Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.

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.

I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.

I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance — a sharp, vindictive glance.

I hate women because they always know where things are.

I have always thought of a dog lover as a dog that was in love with another dog.

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.

I love the idea of there being two sexes, don't you?

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

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.

I'm 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be 48. That's the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40.

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.

If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.

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

It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers.
- Variant: It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.

It is better to have loafed and lost, than never to have loafed at all

Last night I dreamed of a small consolation enjoyed only by the blind: Nobody knows the trouble I've not seen!

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

Let the meek inherit the earth — they have it coming to them.

Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
- Variant: Let us not look back to the past with anger, nor towards the future with fear, but look around with awareness.

Love is blind, but desire just doesn't give a good goddamn

Love is the strange bewilderment that overtakes one person on account of another person.

Man has gone long enough, or even too long, without being man enough to face the simple truth that the trouble with man is man.

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

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

My opposition 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.
- Explaining his opposition to interviews.

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.

No male can beat a female in the long run because they have it over us in sheer, damn longevity.

Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man.

One has but to observe a community of beavers at work in a stream to understand the loss in his sagacity, balance, co-operation, competence, and purpose which Man has suffered since he rose up on his hind legs. He began to chatter and he developed Reason, Thought, and Imagination, qualities which would get the smartest group of rabbits or orioles in the world into inextricable trouble overnight.

One martini is alright, two is too many, three is not enough.
- Variant: One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough.

Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other.

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.

Progress was all right. Only it went on too long.

So much has already been written about everything that you can't find out anything about it.

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

The chill Miss Trent has her men frustrated to a point at which a mortal male would smack her little mouth, so smooth, so firm, so free of nicotine, alcohol and emotion.

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

The dog has got more fun out of man than man has got out of the dog, for man is the more laughable of the two animals.

The dog has seldom been successful in pulling man up to its level of sagacity, but man has frequently dragged the dog down to his.

The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms — hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.

The most dangerous food is wedding cake.

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

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

There are two kinds of light — the glow that illumines, and the glare that obscures.
- Variant: There are two kinds of light — the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.

There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception

There is something about a poet which leads us to believe that he died, in many cases, as long as 20 years before his birth.

[To an admirer who told him that his output read very well in French translation]: Yes, my works lose something in the original.

Unless artists can remember what it was to be a little boy, they are only half complete as artist and as man.

We all have faults, and mine is being wicked.

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.