"Dogs are obsessed with being happy."
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Quote collection
James Thurber quotes (page 6 of 9)
169 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make sense."
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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."
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"Sanity, soundness, and sincerity, of which gleams and strains can still be found in the human brain under powerful microscopes, flourish only in a culture of clarification, which is now becoming harder and harder to detect with the naked eye."
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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."
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"God bless... God damn."
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"The sanity of the average banquet speaker lasts about two and a half months; at the end of that time he begins to mutter to himself, and calls out in his sleep."
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"Last night I dreamed of a small consolation enjoyed only by the blind: Nobody knows the trouble I've not seen!"
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"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."
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"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."
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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."
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"The Old Man ain’t afraid of hell"
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"For one thing, she pronounced flowers 'flars' and I couldn't let it slide."
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"I can feel a thing I cannot touch and touch a thing I cannot feel. The first is sad and sorry, the second is your heart."
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"It did not take Man long-probably not more than a hundred centuries-to discover that all the animals except the dog were impossible around the house. One has but to spend a few days with an aardvark or llama, command a water buffalo to sit up and beg or try to housebreak a moose, to perceive how wisely Man set about his process of elimination and selection."
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"My grandmother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house. It leaked, she contended, out of empty sockets if the wall switch had been left on. She would go around screwing in bulbs, and if they lighted up, she would fearfully turn off the wall switch and go back to her Pearson's or Everybody's, happy in the satisfaction that she had stopped not only a costly but dangerous leakage. nothing could ever clear this up for her."
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"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."
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"Laughter need not be cut out of anything, since it improves everything."
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"The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel."
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