Best 107 quotes of Christopher Morley on MyQuotes

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

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!

A human being: an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.

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

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.

A mind too proud to unbend over the small ridiculosa of life is as painful as a library with no trash in it.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Blessed is the satirist; and blessed the ironist; blessed the witty scoffer, and blessed the sentimentalist; for each, having seen one spoke of the wheel, thinks to have seen all, and is content.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

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

One of the penalties of being a human being is other human beings.

Only the sinner has the right to preach.

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

Perhaps this is an age when men think bravely of the human spirit; for surely they have a strange lust to lay it bare.

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.

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.