Christopher Morley Quotes

68 Sourced Quotes

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
Having made up our mind to become an engineer, we thought it would be a mistake not to take advantage of all possible aid.

Christopher Morley
The only previous time he had taken gas was in a dentist's office in the Flatiron Building. Whenever he visited that dentist he was always thrilled by the view from the chair, which included the ornate balconies of the old Madison Square Garden and the silhouette of Diana tiptoe in the sky.

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

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

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
The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads to madness.

Christopher Morley
Words, he concluded, are a commodity in which there is never any slump. Talk is the greatest industry, and all human beings move in clouds of it — not merely their own, but in the rumors and representations of others, to which they are sometimes painfully sensitive.

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 continually be part of unanimity.

Christopher Morley
There was so much handwriting on the wall That even the wall fell down.

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

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

Christopher Morley
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
Happiness is surely the best teacher of good manners: only the unhappy are churlish in deportment.

Christopher Morley
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.

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
There is but one success — to be able to spend life in your own way and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it.

Christopher Morley
Why do they put the Gideon Bibles only in the bedrooms, where it's usually too late, and not in the barroom downstairs?

Christopher Morley
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
Chattering voltage like a broken wire The wild cicada cried, Six weeks to frost!

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

Christopher Morley
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!

Christopher Morley
No man is lonely eating spaghetti; it requires so much attention.

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

Christopher Morley
Dancing is 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
The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.

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