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Christopher Morley Quotes

Journalist, Novelist
Born On
1890-05-05
Died On
1957-03-28
Birth Place
Haverford
Death Place
New York
Birth Sign
taurus
Father
Frank Morley
Mother
Lilian Janet Bird
Spouse
Helen Booth Fairchild
Nationality
American
Education
Haverford College, New College, Oxford, University of Oxford

A wise man once 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 worthwhile — 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 worthwhile. That’s what this country needs — more books!” The ingenious soul was none other than American writer Christopher Morley. The above is an excerpt from his first novel ‘Parnassus on Wheels’. Here’s another instance of Morley’s sense of humor. Apparently Morley and his friend, author William Rose Benet were window shopping and they happened to cross a wig shop. A pair of identical wigs grabbed the attention of the two men and Morley remarked that “They’re alike as toupees in a pod.”

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

Christopher Morley

Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting.

Christopher Morley

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

Christopher Morley

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

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

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

Christopher Morley

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

Christopher Morley

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

Christopher Morley

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

Christopher Morley

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

Christopher Morley

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

Christopher Morley

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

Christopher Morley

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

Christopher Morley

Act like you expect to get into the end zone.

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

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

Christopher Morley

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

Christopher Morley

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

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

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

Christopher Morley

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.

Christopher Morley

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.

Christopher Morley

The trouble with wedlock is that there's not enough wed and too much lock.

Christopher Morley

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.

Christopher Morley

Man, an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.

Christopher Morley

The misfortunes hardest to bear are these which never came.

Christopher Morley

A human being: an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.

Christopher Morley

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

Christopher Morley

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

Christopher Morley

Only the sinner has the right to preach.

Christopher Morley

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.

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

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

Christopher Morley

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

Christopher Morley

Words are a commodity in which there is never any slump.

Christopher Morley

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.

Christopher Morley

If you have to keep reminding yourself of a thing, perhaps it isn't so.

Christopher Morley

Why do they put the Gideon bibles only in the bedrooms, where it's usually too late?

Christopher Morley

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

Christopher Morley

All students can learn.

Christopher Morley

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.

Christopher Morley

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

Christopher Morley