Christopher Morley Quotes & Sayings

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. — Christopher Morley

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

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. — Christopher Morley

It is so easy to let life go by us in its swift amusing course, that sometimes it hardly seems worthwhile to attempt any bold strokes for truth. Truth, of course, does not need assistance; it can afford to ignore our errors. But in this quiet place, among the whisper of the trees, I seem to have heard a disconcerning sound. I have heard laughter, and I think it is the laughter of God. — Christopher Morley

That's what this country needs -- more books! — Christopher Morley

People need books, but they don't know they need them. Generally they are not aware that the books they need are in existence. - Roger Mifflin — Christopher Morley

There is no one so grateful as the man to whom you have given just the book his soul needed and he never knew it. — Christopher Morley

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

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

It's in books that most of us learn how splendidly worth-while life is. — Christopher Morley

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

Summer was over, and we were no longer young, but there were great things before us. — Christopher Morley

Very often human beings don't become available for the purposes of art until they have shaken off some of their dogged, self-preserving sanity. — Christopher Morley

Why do they put the Gideon bibles only in the bedrooms, where it's usually too late? — Christopher Morley

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

We have all sorts of conditions of booksellers: one is fanatic on the subject of libraries. He thinks that every public library should be dynamited. Another thinks that moving pictures will destroy the book trade. What rot! Surely everything that arouses people's minds, that makes them alert and questing, increases their appetite for books. - Roger Mifflin — Christopher Morley

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

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. — Christopher Morley

But, as our friend Samuel Butler says, he that is stupid in little will also be stupid in much. — Christopher Morley

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

As far as I can see, a man who's fond of books never need starve! — Christopher Morley

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

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. — Christopher Morley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Christopher Morley

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

The people in books become more real to you than any one in actual life. — Christopher Morley

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

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

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

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

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

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

Human beings pay very little attention to what is told them unless they know something about it already. — Christopher Morley

The enemies of the future are always the very nicest people. — Christopher Morley

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

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. — Christopher Morley

Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting. — Christopher Morley

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

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. — Christopher Morley

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

Laziness is always dignified, it is always reposeful. Philosophical laziness, we mean. The kind of laziness that is based upon a carefully reasoned analysis of experience. Acquired laziness. We have no respect for those who were born lazy; it is like being born a millionaire: they cannot appreciate their bliss. It is the man who has hammered his laziness out of the stubborn material of life for whom we chant praise and allelulia. — Christopher Morley

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. — Christopher Morley

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. — Christopher Morley

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. — Christopher Morley

Suppose someone tried to write your biography. What nonsense! How much would he know? Would he know what you thought when you looked in the subway slot-machine? How brutally you spoke when you were angry? How Nature rode you with a busy spur? How you fell on your knees late at night? — Christopher Morley

Even the most innocent of men's affairs seem doomed to cause suffering. Pushing the lawnmower through tall wet grass, and enjoying the strong aroma of the morning, I found that the blades had cut a frog in half. I have not forgotten his eyes. — Christopher Morley

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

I like the Iliad and the Argosy — Christopher Morley

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

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

Cherish all your happy moments: they make a fine cushion for old age. — Christopher Morley

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

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. — Christopher Morley

One of the penalties of being a human being is other human beings — Christopher Morley

This book Is intended to be read in bed. Please do not attempt to read it anywhere else. — Christopher Morley

All students can learn. — Christopher Morley

Laughter and prayer are the two noblest habits of man; they mark us off from the brutes. — Christopher Morley

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. — Christopher Morley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Although he kept late hours, Roger Mifflin was a prompt riser. It is only the very young who find satisfaction in lying abed in the morning. Those who approach the term of the fifth decade are sensitively aware of the fluency of life, and have no taste to squander it among the blankets. — Christopher Morley

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

And the dog by the fender stretched himself out in the luxuriant vacancy of mind only known to dogs surrounded by a happy group of their friends. — Christopher Morley

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

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

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

A good book ought to have something simple about it. And, like Eve, it ought to come from somewhere near the third rib: there ought to be a heart beating in it. A story that's all forehead doesn't amount to much. — Christopher Morley

A human being: an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing. — Christopher Morley

Malnutrition of the reading faculty is a serious thing. Let us prescribe for you. — Christopher Morley

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

Books are the immortality of the race, the father and mother of most that is worth while cherishing in our hearts. To spread good books about, to sow them on fertile minds, to propagate understanding and a carefulness of life and beauty, isn't that high enough mission for a man? — Christopher Morley

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

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

April prepares her green traffic light and the world thinks Go. — Christopher Morley

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

ON THE RETURN OF A BOOK
LENT TO A FRIEND
I GIVE humble and hearty thanks for the safe return of this book which having endured the perils of my friend's bookcase, and the bookcases of my friend's friends, now returns to me in reasonably good condition.
I GIVE humble and hearty thanks that my friend did not see fit to give this book to his infant as a plaything, nor use it as an ash-tray for his burning cigar, nor as a teething-ring for his mastiff.
WHEN I lent this book I deemed it as lost: I was resigned to the bitterness of the long parting: I never thought to look upon its pages again.
BUT NOW that my book is come back to me, I rejoice and am exceeding glad! Bring hither the fatted morocco and let us rebind the volume and set it on the shelf of honour: for this my book was lent, and is returned again.
PRESENTLY, therefore, I may return some of the books that I myself have borrowed. — Christopher Morley

The beauty of being a bookseller is that you don't have to be a literary critic: all you have to do to books is enjoy them. — Christopher Morley

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

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

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

New York, the nation's thyroid gland. — Christopher Morley

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

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

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

I think reading a good book makes one modest. When you see the marvelous insight into human nature which a truly great book shows, it is bound to make you feel small
like looking at the Big Dipper on a clear night, or seeing the winter sunrise when you go out to collect the morning eggs. And anything that makes you feel small is mighty good for you. — Christopher Morley

The fact that Holmes had earlier lodgings in Montague Street (alongside the British Museum) is forgotten. That was before Watson and we must have Watson too. — Christopher Morley

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

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