James Thurber Men Quotations

Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.

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

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

All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.

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).

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Those rare souls whose spirit gets magically into the hearts of men leave behind them something real and warmly personal... the grace of a fine spirit pervades the places through which it has passed, like the haunting loveliness of mignonette.

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.

Man is troubled by what might be called the Dog Wish, a strange and involved compulsion to be as happy and carefree as a dog

Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.

Though statisticians in our time have never kept the score, Man wants a great deal here below and Woman even more.

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.

Somebody has said that woman's place is in the wrong. That's fine. What the wrong needs is a woman's presence and a woman's touch. She is far better equipped than men to set it right.

The Old Man ain’t afraid of hell

Until a man can quit talking loudly to himself in order to shout down the memories of blunderings and gropings, he is in no shape for the painstaking examination of distress.

Men are more interesting than women, but women ae more fascinating.

I don't believe the writer should know too much where he's going. If he does, he runs into old man blueprint—old man propaganda.

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.

When man gives up on reforming and inspiring society he also gives up his freedom.

Art – the one achievement of man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised