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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The plural of spouse is spice.

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

Act like you expect to get into the end zone.

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.

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

The misfortunes hardest to bear are these which never came.

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

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.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

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.

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

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

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'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.

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.

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

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.

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

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...?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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