Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American novelist Christopher Morley.
Last updated on November 3, 2024.
Christopher Darlington Morley was an American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet. He also produced stage productions for a few years and gave college lectures.
If you have to keep reminding yourself of a thing, perhaps it isn't so.
A human being: an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.
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.
The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
When you sell a man a book, you don't sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life.
The enemies of the future are always the very nicest people.
People like to imagine that because all our mechanical equipment moves so much faster, that we are thinking faster, too.
New York, the nation's thyroid gland.
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.
Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting.
God made man merely to hear some praise of what he'd done on those Five Days.
Only the sinner has the right to preach.
Words are a commodity in which there is never any slump.
We've had bad luck with our kids - they've all grown up.
No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as the dog does.
There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way.
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.
A man who has never made a woman angry is a failure in life.
High heels were invented by a woman who had been kissed on the forehead.
Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.
Man, an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.
All students can learn.
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.
Act like you expect to get into the end zone.
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.
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.
My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.
There is only one rule for being a good talker - learn to listen.
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.
There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning and yearning.
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.
The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.
If we discovered that we only had 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.
All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful: but the beauty is grim.
The misfortunes hardest to bear are these which never came.
The trouble with wedlock is that there's not enough wed and too much lock.
The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.
It is unfair to blame man too fiercely for being pugnacious; he learned the habit from Nature.
In every man's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.
No man is lonely eating spaghetti; it requires so much attention.
Heavy hearts, like heavy clouds in the sky, are best relieved by the letting of a little water.
Why do they put the Gideon bibles only in the bedrooms, where it's usually too late?
They go in [to the library] not because they need any certain volume but because they feel that there may be some book that needs them.
One of the penalties of being a human being is other human beings.
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.
What is the virtue and service of a book? Only to help me live less gingerly and shabbily.
Happiness is surely the best teacher of good manners: only the unhappy are churlish in deportment.
Religion is an attempt, a noble attempt, to suggest in human terms more-than-human realities.
April prepares her green traffic light and the world thinks Go.
The censure of a dog is something no man can stand.
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.
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.
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.
Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking.
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.
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.
There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.
Why do they put the Gideon Bibles only in the bedrooms, where it's usually too late...?
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.
Be prepared for truth at all hours and in the most fantastic disguises. This is the only safety.