Christopher Morley Quotes

Christopher Morley mixes clever observations with bright humor, turning everyday moments into a fresh, witty view.

42 quotes

1. 'Lord!' he said, 'when you sell a man a book you don't sell him 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 I mean. Jiminy! If I were the baker or the butcher or the broom huckster, people would run to the gate when I came by - just waiting for my stuff. And here I go loaded with everlasting salvation - yes, ma'am, salvation for their little, stunted minds - and it's hard to make 'em see it. That's what makes it worth while - I'm doing something that nobody else from Nazareth, Maine, to Walla Walla, Washington, has ever thought of. It's a new field, but by the bones of Whitman, it's worth while. That's what this country needs - more books!'

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. Philadelphia was the first city to foresee the advantages of a Federal constitution and oatmeal as a breakfast food.

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

7. There is only one success,... to be able to spend your life in your own way.

8. A man who has never made a woman angry is a failure in life.

9. April prepares her green traffic light, and the world thinks GO!

10. Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting.

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

12. No man is lonely while eating spaghetti - it requires too much attention.

13. No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversations as a dog does.

14. 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.

15. 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!

16. Beware of the conversationalist who adds "in other words." He is merely starting afresh.

17. That's what this country needs -- more books!

18. 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.

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

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

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

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

23. The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.

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

25. High heels were invented by a woman who had been kissed on the forehead.

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

27. A human being: an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.

28. The enemies of the future are always the very nicest people.

29. 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.

30. 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.

31. 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.

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

33. I wish there could be an international peace conference of booksellers, for (you will smile at this) my own conviction is that the future happiness of the world depends in no small measure on them and on the librarians.

34. 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.

35. 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.

36. Only the sinner has the right to preach.

37. Truth is the ricochet of a prejudice bouncing off a fact.

38. Fifty percent of the world are women, yet they always seem a novelty.

39. The unluckiest insolvent in the world is the man whose expenditure of speech is too great for his income of ideas.

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

41. 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.

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