“I am not sure of anything, I know nothing. Can you imagine that I don’t even know the date of my own death?”

So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

I gazed at every mirror on the planet, not one gave back my reflection.

Only in the present do things happen.

Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.

Time, which despoils castles, enriches verses.

Each thing implies the universe.

All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

Israelites, Christians and Muslims profess immortality, but the veneration they render this world proves they believe only in it, since they destine all other worlds, in infinite number, to be its reward or punishment.

Soccer is popular because stupidity is popular.

Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love.

Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.

He consorted with prostitutes and poets and with persons even worse.

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left.

No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry.

Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms

A diamond was laying in the street covered with dirt. Many fools passed by. Someone who knew diamonds picked it up.

Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule. Nevertheless one had better know the rules, for they sometimes guide in doubtful cases, though not often.

I also know that while I am black I am a human being, and therefore I have the right to go into any public place. White people didn’t know that.Every time I tried to go into a place they stopped me

Good athletes do not know what tiredness is. They do not know what discouragement is. Good athletes only know what victory is.

If you seek approval from others in this world, you will not know happiness.

If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.

I never quite know when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, “Dammit, Thurber, stop writing.” She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph.