Quote

Humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human character and achievement, inseparable.

James Thurber

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

James Thurber
Age: 66 †
Born: 1894
Born: December 18
Died: 1961
Died: November 2
Autobiographer
Cartoonist
Drawer
Humorist
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Columbus
Ohio
James Grover Thurber
Achievement
Tears
Highest
Expression
Humor
Character
Pathos
Human
Inseparable
Humans
Laughter

More quotes by James Thurber

Image
If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
James Thurber
Image
Beautiful things don't ask for attention.
James Thurber
Image
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.
James Thurber
Image
You are all a lost generation, Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night.
James Thurber
Image
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
Image
No male can beat a female in the long run because they have it over us in sheer, damn longevity.
James Thurber
Image
Men are more interesting than women, but women ae more fascinating.
James Thurber
Image
This is the posture of fortunes slave: one foot in the gravy, one foot in the grave.
James Thurber
Image
He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes.
James Thurber
Image
A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make sense.
James Thurber
Image
So much has already been written about everything that you can't find out anything about it.
James Thurber
Image
Remember laughter. You'll need it even in the blessed isles of Ever After.
James Thurber
Image
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
Image
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.
James Thurber
Image
Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counselling 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?'
James Thurber
Image
I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand.
James Thurber
Image
Dogs are obsessed with being happy.
James Thurber
Image
You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
James Thurber
Image
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
Image
I make mistakes, but I am on the side of Good, the Golux said, by accident and happenchance. I had high hopes of being Evil when I was two, but in my youth I came upon a firefly burning in a spider's web. I saved the victim's life. The firefly's ? said the minstrel. The spider's. The blinking arsonist had set the web on fire.
James Thurber