90 Quotes by Christopher Morley
Christopher Morley was a prolific and versatile author whose literary works encompassed a wide array of genres, including essays, poetry, novels, and plays. A charming wordsmith with a keen sense of humor, Morley had an uncanny ability to captivate readers with his delightful storytelling and witty observations on life's quirks. He was a central figure in the "Knights of the Round Table" literary group, which fostered a warm camaraderie among its members and provided an intellectual sanctuary for emerging writers in the early 20th century.
Among Morley's most celebrated works are "Parnassus on Wheels" and its sequel "The Haunted Bookshop," which offered endearing tributes to the world of books and the joys of reading. Throughout his career, Morley's literary contributions extended beyond his own writing, as he worked as an editor and essayist, championing the cause of literature and the value of libraries. His enduring passion for the written word and his ability to infuse his works with a sense of wonder continue to inspire book lovers and writers alike, emphasizing the timeless importance of literature in shaping our intellectual and emotional landscapes.
Christopher Morley Quotes
There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way.
All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful: but the beauty is grim.
Heavy hearts, like heavy clouds in the sky, are best relieved by the letting of a little water.
No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as the dog does.
There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning and yearning.
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.
High heels were invented by a woman who had been kissed on the forehead.
April prepares her green traffic light and the world thinks Go.
There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.
A man who has never made a woman angry is a failure in life.
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.
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.
The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.
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.
Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting.
The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.
There is only one rule for being a good talker - learn to listen.
Act like you expect to get into the end zone.
In every man's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.
The enemies of the future are always the very nicest people.
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.
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.
A human being: an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.
The misfortunes hardest to bear are these which never came.
Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.
Mr. Gilbert had the earnest mania for self-improvement which has blighted the lives of so many young men.
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.
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.
New York, the nation's thyroid gland.
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.
What is the virtue and service of a book? Only to help me live less gingerly and shabbily.
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.
If you have to keep reminding yourself of a thing, perhaps it isn't so.
Friendships do not grow up in any carefully tended and contemplated fashion.... They begin haphazard.
The censure of a dog is something no man can stand.
The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
Why do they put the Gideon Bibles only in the bedrooms, where it's usually too late...?
It is unfair to blame man too fiercely for being pugnacious; he learned the habit from Nature.
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.
Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking.
We've had bad luck with our kids - they've all grown up.
The trouble with wedlock is that there's not enough wed and too much lock.
There is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven which we inhabit when we read a good book.
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.
My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.
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.
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.
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.
People like to imagine that because all our mechanical equipment moves so much faster, that we are thinking faster, too.
One of the penalties of being a human being is other human beings.
God made man merely to hear some praise of what he'd done on those Five Days.
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.
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.
Truth is the ricochet of a prejudice bouncing off a fact.
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.
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.
Words are a commodity in which there is never any slump.
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.
Happiness is surely the best teacher of good manners: only the unhappy are churlish in deportment.
Only the sinner has the right to preach.
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.
A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by.
How womanly it is to ask the unanswerable at the moment impossible.
Be prepared for truth at all hours and in the most fantastic disguises. This is the only safety.
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.
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.
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!
Beware of the conversationalist who adds "in other words." He is merely starting afresh.
The greatest poem ever known Is one all poets have outgrown: The poetry, innate, untold, Of being only four years old.
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.
There are a lot of people who must have the table laid in the usual fashion or they will not enjoy the dinner.
The everlasting lure of round-the-corner, how fascinating it is.
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!
It will be a shock to men when they realize that thoughts that were fast enough for today are not fast enough for tomorrow. But thinking tomorrow's thoughts today is one kind of future life.
Fifty percent of the world are women, yet they always seem a novelty.
The evening papers print what they do and get away with it because by afternoon the human mind is ruined anyhow.
There are certain people whom one feels almost inclined to urge to hurry up and die so that their letters can be published.
Religion is an attempt, a noble attempt, to suggest in human terms more-than-human realities.
The unluckiest insolvent in the world is the man whose expenditure of speech is too great for his income of ideas.
Standing by the crib of one's own baby, with that world - old pang of compassion and protectiveness toward this so little creature that has all its course to run, the heart flies back in yearning and gratitude to those who felt just so toward one's self. Then for the first time one understands the homely succession of sacrifices and pains by which life is transmitted and fostered down the stumbling generations of men.
That's what this country needs more books!
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.
Blessed is he who has never been tempted; for he knows not the frailty of his rectitude.
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.
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.
Man makes a great fuss about this planet which is only a ballbearing in the hub of the universe.
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.
Perhaps this is an age when men think bravely of the human spirit; for surely they have a strange lust to lay it bare.
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.
Being in a hurry seems so fiercely important when you yourself are the hurrier and so comically ludicrous when it is someone else.
― Christopher Morley Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
