Christopher Morley Quotes

Only the sinner has the right to preach.

There are a lot of people who must have the table laid in the usual fashion or they will not enjoy the dinner.

Blessed is the satirist; and blessed the ironist; blessed the witty scoffer, and blessed the sentimentalist; for each, having seen one spoke of the wheel, thinks to have seen all, and is content.

How womanly it is to ask the unanswerable at the moment impossible.

When Abraham Lincoln was murdered The one thing that interested Matthew Arnold Was that the assassin shouted in Latin As he lept on the stage This convinced Matthew There was still hope for America.

Beauty is ever to the lonely mind a shadow fleeting; she is never plain. She is a visitor who leaves behind the gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.

God made man merely to hear some praise of what he'd done on those Five Days.

Act like you expect to get into the end zone.

One of the penalties of being a human being is other human beings.

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.

Truth is what every man sees lurking at the bottom of his own soul, like the oyster shell housewives put in the kitchen kettle to collect the lime from the water. By and by each man's iridescent oyster shell of Truth becomes coated with the lime of prejudice and hearsay.

A man who has never made a woman angry is a failure in life.

Friendships do not grow up in any carefully tended and contemplated fashion.... They begin haphazard.

Everybody thinks of others as being excessively human, with all the frailties and crotchets appertaining to that curious condition. But each of us also seems to regard himself as existing on a detached plane of observation, exempt (save in moments of avid crisis) from the strange whims of humanity en masse.

All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful: but the beauty is grim.

In every man's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.

A mind too proud to unbend over the small ridiculosa of life is as painful as a library with no trash in it.

When you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book.

My prayer is that what we have gone through [World War One] will startle the world into some new realization of the sanctity of life, animal as well as human.

Dancing is a wonderful training for girls, it's the first way you learn to guess what a man is going to do before he does it.

Poetry comes with anger, hunger and dismay; it does not often visit groups of citizens sitting down to be literary together, and would appal them if it did.

Men talk of "finding God," but no wonder it is difficult; He is hidden in that darkest hiding-place, your heart. You yourself are a part of Him.

Perhaps this is an age when men think bravely of the human spirit; for surely they have a strange lust to lay it bare.

The most interesting persons are always those who have nothing special to do: children, nurses, policemen and actors at 11 o'clock in the morning.

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

The greatest poem ever known Is one all poets have outgrown: The poetry, innate, untold, Of being only four years old.

We visit bookshops not so often to buy any one special book, but rather to rediscover, in the happier and more expressive words of others, our own encumbered soul.

We call a child's mind 'small' simply by habit; perhaps it is larger than ours is, for it can take in almost anything without effort.

There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love, and like that colossal adventure it is an experience of great social import. Even as the tranced swain, the booklover yearns to tell others of his bliss. He writes letters about it, adds it to the postscript of all manner of communications, intrudes it into telephone messages, and insists on his friends writing down the title of the find. Like the simple-hearted betrothed, once certain of his conquest

Religion is an attempt, a noble attempt, to suggest in human terms more-than-human realities.

The misfortunes hardest to bear are these which never came.

Man is unconquerable because he can make even his helplessness so entertaining. His motto seems to be "Even though He slay me, yet will I make fun of Him!

The evening papers print what they do and get away with it because by afternoon the human mind is ruined anyhow.

Being in a hurry seems so fiercely important when you yourself are the hurrier and so comically ludicrous when it is someone else.

There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.

Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting.

I wish there could be an international peace conference of booksellers, for (you will smile at this) my own conviction is that the future happiness of the world depends in no small measure on them and on the librarians.

A doctor is advertised by the bodies he cures. My business is advertised by the minds I stimulate. And let me tell you that the book business is different from other trades. People don't know they want books. I can see just by looking at you that your mind is ill for lack of books but you are blissfully unaware of it!

The everlasting lure of round-the-corner, how fascinating it is.

Why do they put the Gideon Bibles only in the bedrooms, where it's usually too late...?

Words are a commodity in which there is never any slump.

If we discovered that we only had five minutes left to say all that we wanted to say, every telephone booth would be occupied by people calling other people to stammer that they loved them.

It is unfair to blame man too fiercely for being pugnacious; he learned the habit from Nature.

High heels were invented by a woman who had been kissed on the forehead.

They go in [to the library] not because they need any certain volume but because they feel that there may be some book that needs them.

The world, in its sheer exuberance of kindness, will try to bury the poet with warm and lovely human trivialities. It will even ask him to autograph books.

It's a good thing to turn your mind upside down now and then, like an hour-glass, to let the particles run the other way.

Truth, like milk, arrives in the dark But even so, wise dogs don't bark. Only mongrels make it hard For the milkman to come up the yard.