Top 100 Christopher Morley Quotes
#1. 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.
Christopher Morley
#2. 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.
Christopher Morley
#3. Calling us men doesn't make us men. No creature on earth has a right to think himself a human being if he doesn't know at least one good book.
Christopher Morley
#4. 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.
Christopher Morley
#5. The trouble with wedlock is that there's not enough wed and too much lock.
Christopher Morley
#6. 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
#9. Life's a lot different from what people pretend. That's why pretending is fun. I used to think it was some special wickedness of my own that made such queer things happen. Now I'm beginning to guess that everybody's like that.
Christopher Morley
#10. Lord! 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.
Christopher Morley
#11. 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.
Christopher Morley
#12. There are certain people whom one feels almost inclined to urge to hurry up and die so that their letters can be published.
Christopher Morley
#13. They go in not because they need any certain volume but because they feel that there may be some book that needs them.
Christopher Morley
#15. A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by.
Christopher Morley
#16. 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.
Christopher Morley
#17. 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.
Christopher Morley
#19. Poetry is like an unexpected noise in the night: the creak of a door, a footstep on the porch, the soft scuffle of a moth against the screen, which rouses every sense to an instant alert. So comes poetry to the drowsy mind, which startles a moment, wonders, and returns to sleep.
Christopher Morley
#21. 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.
Christopher Morley
#22. There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.
Christopher Morley
#23. Why do they put the Gideon bibles only in the bedrooms, where it's usually too late?
Christopher Morley
#24. What absurd victims of contrary desires we are! If a man is settled in one place he yearns to wander; when he wanders he yearns to have a home. And yet how bestial is content - all the great things in life are done by discontented people.
Christopher Morley
#25. No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as the dog does.
Christopher Morley
#26. Perhaps this is an age when men think bravely of the human spirit; for surely they have a strange lust to lay it bare.
Christopher Morley
#28. Friendships do not grow up in any carefully tended and contemplated fashion ... They begin haphazard.
Christopher Morley
#29. It always seemed to me that [Henry James] had a kind of rush of words to the head and never stopped to sort them out properly.
Christopher Morley
#31. My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated, but not signed.
Christopher Morley
#32. Blessed is he who has never been tempted; for he knows not the frailty of his rectitude.
Christopher Morley
#33. 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.
Christopher Morley
#35. The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
Christopher Morley
#36. 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 be always part of unanimity.
Christopher Morley
#37. The greatest poem ever known Is one all poets have outgrown: The poetry, innate, untold, Of being only four years old.
Christopher Morley
#38. How womanly it is to ask the unanswerable at the moment impossible.
Christopher Morley
#39. That's the kind of thing, if you get to thinking about, that could wake you in the middle of night. I didn't want my nights to have any middles.
Christopher Morley
#41. Malnutrition of the reading faculty is a serious thing. Let us prescribe for you.
Christopher Morley
#42. The little Plumpuppets are fairies of beds; They have nothing to do but watch sleepyheads; They turn down the sheets and they tuck you in tight, And dance on your pillow to wish you good night!
Christopher Morley
#44. Oh, silly woman! Leave your stove, your pots and pans and chores, even if only for one day! Come out and see the sun in the sky and the river in the distance!
Christopher Morley
#45. 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.
Christopher Morley
#46. 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.
Christopher Morley
#47. 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.
Christopher Morley
#48. 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.
Christopher Morley
#49. There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning, and yearning. A man should be learning as he goes; and he should be earning bread for himself and others; and he should be yearning, too: yearning to know the unknowable.
Christopher Morley
#50. Each of us, desperately clutching his identity amid the impalatable onward pour of Time and Thought, finds only in art-and chiefly in written art- means to halt that ceaseless, cruel drift.
Christopher Morley
#51. Cherish all your happy moments: they make a fine cushion for old age.
Christopher Morley
#52. But if you're smart you don't hold up your hand in class and ask to be called on.
Christopher Morley
#53. 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.
Christopher Morley
#54. Heavy hearts, like heavy clouds in the sky, are best relieved by the letting of a little water.
Christopher Morley
#57. A mind too proud to unbend over the small ridiculosa of life is as painful as a library with no trash in it.
Christopher Morley
#58. High heels were invented by a woman who had been kissed on the forehead.
Christopher Morley
#59. Everywhere, as we go about our small business, we must discern the fingerprints of the gigantic plan, the orderly and inexorable routine with neither beginning nor end, in which death is but a preface to another birth, and birth the certain forerunner of another death.
Christopher Morley
#60. For paradise in the world to come is uncertain, but there is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven we inhabit when we read a good book.
Christopher Morley
#61. It is unfair to blame man too fiercely for being pugnacious; he learned the habit from Nature.
Christopher Morley
#62. But, as our friend Samuel Butler says, he that is stupid in little will also be stupid in much.
Christopher Morley
#63. Laughter and prayer are the two noblest habits of man; they mark us off from the brutes.
Christopher Morley
#64. There is only one success-to be able to spend life in your own way.
Christopher Morley
#65. There are fashions in saying things just as there are fashions in clothes. You wear what other people are wearing not so much because it's attractive but so as not to be conspicuous; so you can go on bind yourself underneath without being noticed too much.
Christopher Morley
#67. It is intolerable for a human being to go on doing any task as a penance, under duress.
Christopher Morley
#68. 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.
Christopher Morley
#69. 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.
Christopher Morley
#70. If you have to keep reminding yourself of a thing, perhaps it isn't so.
Christopher Morley
#71. Never write up your diary on the day itself, for it takes longer than that to know what happened.
Christopher Morley
#72. 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!
Christopher Morley
#73. The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.
Christopher Morley
#74. God made man merely to hear some praise of what he'd done on those Five Days.
Christopher Morley
#75. 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.
Christopher Morley
#76. If we discovered that we had only 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.
Christopher Morley
#77. 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.
Christopher Morley
#78. People like to imagine that because all our mechanical equipment moves so much faster, that we are thinking faster, too.
Christopher Morley
#80. Happiness is surely the best teacher of good manners: only the unhappy are churlish in deportment.
Christopher Morley
#81. There is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven which we inhabit when we read a good book.
Christopher Morley
#85. It's in books that most of us learn how splendidly worth-while life is.
Christopher Morley
#86. What is the virtue and service of a book? Only to help me live less gingerly and shabbily.
Christopher Morley
#87. Human beings pay very little attention to what is told them unless they know something about it already.
Christopher Morley
#89. This book Is intended to be read in bed. Please do not attempt to read it anywhere else.
Christopher Morley
#90. It's funny how we hate to face realities. I knew a commuter once who rode in town every day on the 8.13. But he used to call it the 7.73. He said it made him feel more virtuous.
Christopher Morley
#91. The unluckiest insolvent in the world is the man whose expenditure of speech is too great for his income of ideas.
Christopher Morley
#92. 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.
Christopher Morley
#93. Summer was over, and we were no longer young, but there were great things before us.
Christopher Morley
#95. 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.
Christopher Morley
#96. In every man's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.
Christopher Morley
#97. The evening papers print what they do and get away with it because by afternoon the human mind is ruined anyhow.
Christopher Morley
#98. There are a lot of people who must have the table laid in the usual fashion or they will not enjoy the dinner.
Christopher Morley
#99. There are only about 30,000 really important books in the world. I suppose about 5,000 of them were written in the English language, and 5,000 more have been translated. - Roger Mifflin
Christopher Morley
#100. Fifty percent of the world are women, yet they always seem a novelty.
Christopher Morley
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