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Home > Dictionary of Science Quotations > Scientist Names Index T > James Thurber Quotes

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James Thurber
(8 Dec 1894 - 2 Nov 1961)

American writer, cartoonist and playwright who wrote 40 books, including The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and created many cover cartoons for New Yorker magazine.

Science Quotes by James Thurber (5 quotes)

[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.
— James Thurber
In My Life and Hard Times (1937, 1999), 16.
Science quotes on:  |  Back (395)  |  Bulb (10)  |  Danger (127)  |  Dangerous (108)  |  Drip (2)  |  Electricity (168)  |  Empty (82)  |  Everybody (72)  |  Happy (108)  |  Horror (15)  |  House (143)  |  Leak (4)  |  Life (1870)  |  Light (635)  |  Nothing (1000)  |  Satisfaction (76)  |  Socket (2)  |  Suspicion (36)  |  Switch (10)  |  Turn (454)  |  Wall (71)  |  Year (963)

Science has zipped the atom open in a dozen places, it can read the scrawlings on the Rosetta stone as glibly as a literary critic explains Hart Crane, but it doesn’t know anything about playwrights.
— James Thurber
In article 'Roaming in the Gloaming' collected in Collecting Himself: James Thurber on Writing and Writers, Humour and Himself (1989). As cited in Eugene Ehrlich and Marshall De Bruhl (eds.)International Thesaurus of Quotations (1996), 601.
Science quotes on:  |  Atom (381)  |  Explain (334)  |  Know (1538)  |  Open (277)  |  Playwright (2)  |  Read (308)  |  Rosetta Stone (4)  |  Scrawl (3)  |  Stone (168)  |  Zip (2)

Skepticism is a useful tool of the inquisitive mind, but it is scarcely a method of investigation.
— James Thurber
(1928). As quoted, without source, in James P. Vanyo, 'The Legal System: Can it be Analyzed to Suit the Scientist?', Jurimetric Journal (Winter 1973), 14, No. 2, 106.
Science quotes on:  |  Inquisitive (5)  |  Investigation (250)  |  Method (531)  |  Mind (1377)  |  Scarcely (75)  |  Skepticism (31)  |  Tool (129)  |  Useful (260)

To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, to draw closer, to find each other and to feel. That is the purpose of Life.
— James Thurber
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Science quotes on:  |  Behind (139)  |  Close (77)  |  Closer (43)  |  Dangerous (108)  |  Draw (140)  |  Feel (371)  |  Find (1014)  |  Life (1870)  |  Other (2233)  |  Purpose (336)  |  See (1094)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Wall (71)  |  World (1850)

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
— James Thurber
In 'The Owl Who Was God', The New Yorker (25 Apr 1949).
Science quotes on:  |  Fool (121)  |  People (1031)  |  Time (1911)


Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
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- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


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