Christopher Morley Quotes

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

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

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

There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love, and like that colossal adventure it is an experience of great social import. Even as the tranced swain, the booklover yearns to tell others of his bliss. He writes letters about it, adds it to the postscript of all manner of communications, intrudes it into telephone messages, and insists on his friends writing down the title of the find. Like the simple-hearted betrothed, once certain of his conquest, “I want you to love her, too!” It is a jealous passion also. He feels a little indignant if he finds that any one else has discovered the book, 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

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

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, everyday, 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

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

We’ve had bad luck with our kids – they’ve all grown up.

~ Christopher Morley

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

Laughter and prayer are the two noblest habits of man, they mark us off from the brutes.

~ Christopher Morley

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

~ 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

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

Night, I have discovered, has a faintly bitter taste, caused by its large ingredient of Un-attained Possibility.

~ 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

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 bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.

~ Christopher Morley

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

~ 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

New York the nation's thyroid gland.

~ Christopher Morley

We've had bad luck with our kids - they've all grown up.

~ Christopher Morley

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

~ Christopher Morley

Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting.

~ Christopher Morley

Time is a flowing river. Happy those who allow themselves to be carried unresisting with the current. They float through easy days. They live unquestioning in the moment.

~ Christopher Morley

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

~ Christopher Morley

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

~ Christopher Morley

When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life.

~ Christopher Morley

Act like you expect to get into the end zone.

~ 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

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

~ Christopher Morley

We've had bad luck with our kids - they've all grown up.

~ Christopher Morley

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

~ Christopher Morley

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

~ Christopher Morley

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

~ Christopher Morley

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

No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as the dog does.

~ 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

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

~ Christopher Morley