Zitat des Tages von James Thurber:
A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make sense.
Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man.
Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy, wealthy, and dead.
Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.
If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?
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.
We all have faults, and mine is being wicked.
A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption.
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.
Unless artists can remember what it was to be a little boy, they are only half complete as artist and as man.
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.
Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear end collision.
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.
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.
Last night I dreamed of a small consolation enjoyed only by the blind: Nobody knows the trouble I've not seen!
Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
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.
One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough.
It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
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.
Laughter need not be cut out of anything, since it improves everything.
With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.
You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception.
I think that maybe if women and children were in charge we would get somewhere.
It's a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.
Discussion in America means dissent.
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.
The dog has got more fun out of Man than Man has got out of the dog, for the clearly demonstrable reason that Man is the more laughable of the two animals.
The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.
Love is what you've been through with somebody.
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).
The difference between our decadence and the Russians' is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.
The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.
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.