Christopher Morley Quotes

That's what this country needs -- more books!

Mr. Gilbert had the earnest mania for self-improvement which has blighted the lives of so many young men.

When you sell a man a book, you don't sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life.

Never write up your diary on the day itself, for it takes longer than that to know what happened.

There is an innate decorum in man, and it is not fair to thrust Truth upon people when they don't expect it. Only the very generous are ready for Truth impromptu.

Fifty percent of the world are women, yet they always seem a novelty.

There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning and yearning.

Happiness is surely the best teacher of good manners: only the unhappy are churlish in deportment.

The trouble with wedlock is that there's not enough wed and too much lock.

My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.

Heavy hearts, like heavy clouds in the sky, are best relieved by the letting of a little water.

We've had bad luck with our kids - they've all grown up.

All students can learn.

The man who never in his life Has washed the dishes with his wife Or polished up the silver plate - He still is largely celibate.

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking.

Truth is the ricochet of a prejudice bouncing off a fact.

A human being: an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.

Be prepared for truth at all hours and in the most fantastic disguises. This is the only safety.

Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.

Living in a bookshop is like living in a warehouse of explosives. Those shelves are ranked with the most furious combustibles in the world--the brains of men.

The unluckiest insolvent in the world is the man whose expenditure of speech is too great for his income of ideas.

If you have to keep reminding yourself of a thing, perhaps it isn't so.

The world has been printing books for 450 years, and yet gunpowder still has a wider circulation. Never mind! Printer's ink is the greater explosive: it will win.

Continually one faces the horrible matter of making decisions. The solution is, as far as possible, to avoid conscious rational decisions and choices; simply to do what you find yourself doing; to float in the great current of life with as little friction as possible; to allow things to settle themselves, as indeed they do with the most infallible certainty.

I had a million questions to ask God: but when I met Him, they all fled my mind; and it didn't seem to matter.

Truth and Beauty (perhaps Keats was wrong in identifying them: perhaps they have the relation of Wit and Humour, or Rain and Rainbow) are of interest only to hungry people. There are several kinds of hunger. If Socrates, Spinoza, and Santayana had had free access to a midnight icebox we would never have heard of them. Shall I be ashamed of my little mewing truths?... I ask to be forgiven: they are such tiny ones.

The censure of a dog is something no man can stand.

What is the virtue and service of a book? Only to help me live less gingerly and shabbily.

Blessed is he who has never been tempted; for he knows not the frailty of his rectitude.

Animal crackers, and cocoa to drink That is the finest of suppers, I think When I'm grown up and can have what I please, I think I shall always insist upon these.

There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way.

Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a 'good' book. A book is 'good' only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error.

Man makes a great fuss about this planet which is only a ballbearing in the hub of the universe.

Any man worth his salt has by the time he is forty-five accumulated a crown of thorns, and the problem is to learn to wear it over one ear.

From now until the end of time no one else will ever see life with my eyes, and I mean to make the best of my chance.

The human mind appears suddenly and inexplicably out of some unknown and unimaginable void. It passes half its known life in the mental chaos of sleep. Even when awake it is a victim of its own ill-adjustment, of disease, of age, of external suggestion, of nature's compulsions; it doubts its own sensations and trusts only in instruments and averages.

Lots of times you have to pretend to join a parade in which you're not really interested in order to get where you're going.

Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.

The enemies of the future are always the very nicest people.

There is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven which we inhabit when we read a good book.

People like to imagine that because all our mechanical equipment moves so much faster, that we are thinking faster, too.

Beware of the conversationalist who adds "in other words." He is merely starting afresh.

America is still a government of the naive, for the naive, and by the naive. He who does not know this, nor relish it, has no inkling of the nature of his country.

New York is Babylon : Brooklyn is the truly Holy City. New York is the city of envy, office work, and hustle; Brooklyn is the region of homes and happiness.... There is no hope for New Yorkers, for their glory in Their skyscraping sins; but in Brooklyn there is the wisdom of the lowly.

A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by.

There is only one rule for being a good talker - learn to listen.