Christopher Morley Quotes

There is an innate decorum in man, and it is not fair to thrust Truth upon people when they don't expect it. Only the very generous are ready for Truth impromptu.

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

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!

They go in not because they need any certain volume but because they feel that there may be some book that needs them.

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

It's funny how we hate to face realities. I knew a commuter once who rode in town every day on the 8.13. But he used to call it the 7.73. He said it made him feel more virtuous.

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

People need books, but they don't know they need them. Generally they are not aware that the books they need are in existence. - Roger Mifflin

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.

That's the kind of thing, if you get to thinking about, that could wake you in the middle of night. I didn't want my nights to have any middles.

Only the sinner has the right to preach.

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.

It's in books that most of us learn how splendidly worth-while life is.

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

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

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.

That's why I call this place the Haunted Bookshop. Haunted by the ghosts of the books I haven't read. Poor uneasy spirits, they walk and walk around me. There's only one way to lay the ghost of a book, and that is to read it.

There are fashions in saying things just as there are fashions in clothes. You wear what other people are wearing not so much because it's attractive but so as not to be conspicuous; so you can go on bind yourself underneath without being noticed too much.

Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting.

I've thrilled and shouted with patriotic pride, like everyone. Music and flags and men marching in step have bewitched me, as they do all of us. And then I've gone home and sworn to root this evil instinct out of my soul. God help us - let's love the world, love humanity - not just our own country! That's why I'm so keen about the part we're going to play at the Peace Conference. Our motto over there will be America Last! Hurrah for us, I say, for we shall be the only nation over there with absolutely no axe to grind. Nothing but a pax to grind!

Any man worth his salt has by the time he is forty-five accumulated a crown of thorns, and the problem is to learn to wear it over one ear.

ON THE RETURN OF A BOOK
LENT TO A FRIEND
I GIVE humble and hearty thanks for the safe return of this book which having endured the perils of my friend's bookcase, and the bookcases of my friend's friends, now returns to me in reasonably good condition.
I GIVE humble and hearty thanks that my friend did not see fit to give this book to his infant as a plaything, nor use it as an ash-tray for his burning cigar, nor as a teething-ring for his mastiff.
WHEN I lent this book I deemed it as lost: I was resigned to the bitterness of the long parting: I never thought to look upon its pages again.
BUT NOW that my book is come back to me, I rejoice and am exceeding glad! Bring hither the fatted morocco and let us rebind the volume and set it on the shelf of honour: for this my book was lent, and is returned again.
PRESENTLY, therefore, I may return some of the books that I myself have borrowed.

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

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

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

Truth is what every man sees lurking at the bottom of his own soul, like the oyster shell housewives put in the kitchen kettle to collect the lime from the water. By and by each man's iridescent oyster shell of Truth becomes coated with the lime of prejudice and hearsay.

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.

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

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.

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.

Big shots are just little shots that keep shooting.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it

The greatest poem ever known Is one all poets have outgrown: The poetry, innate, untold, Of being only four years old.

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.

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

The plural of spouse is spice.

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.

Very often human beings don't become available for the purposes of art until they have shaken off some of their dogged, self-preserving sanity.

The world has been printing books for 450 years, and yet gunpowder still has a wider circulation. Never mind! Printer's ink is the greater explosive: it will win.

It is intolerable for a human being to go on doing any task as a penance, under duress.

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

We visit bookshops not so often to buy any one special book, but rather to rediscover, in the happier and more expressive words of others, our own encumbered soul.

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.

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.

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

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

Malnutrition of the reading faculty is a serious thing. Let us prescribe for you.

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.

There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning, and yearning. A man should be learning as he goes; and he should be earning bread for himself and others; and he should be yearning, too: yearning to know the unknowable.

Being in a hurry seems so fiercely important when you yourself are the hurrier and so comically ludicrous when it is someone else.

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

And the dog by the fender stretched himself out in the luxuriant vacancy of mind only known to dogs surrounded by a happy group of their friends.

But, as our friend Samuel Butler says, he that is stupid in little will also be stupid in much.

There are certain people whom one feels almost inclined to urge to hurry up and die so that their letters can be published.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

THIS SHOP IS HAUNTED by the ghosts
Of all great literature, in hosts;
We sell no fakes or trashes.
Lovers of books are welcome here,
No clerks will babble in your ear,
Please smoke
but don't drop ashes!
Browse as long as you like.
Prices of all books plainly marked.
If you want to ask questions, you'll find the proprietor
where the tobacco smoke is thickest.
We pay cash for books.
We have what you want, though you may not know you want it.
Malnutrition of the reading faculty is a serious thing.
Let us prescribe for you.
By R. & H. MIFFLIN,

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!

There is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven which we inhabit when we read a good book.

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

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

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

The people in books become more real to you than any one in actual life.

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.

But if you're smart you don't hold up your hand in class and ask to be called on.

It's one of the uncanniest things I know to watch a real book on its career―it follows you and follows you and drives you into a corner and makes you read it.

A human being: an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.

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.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

Standing by the crib of one's own baby, with that world - old pang of compassion and protectiveness toward this so little creature that has all its course to run, the heart flies back in yearning and gratitude to those who felt just so toward one's self. Then for the first time one understands the homely succession of sacrifices and pains by which life is transmitted and fostered down the stumbling generations of men.

This book Is intended to be read in bed. Please do not attempt to read it anywhere else.

I have always suffered from the feeling that it's better to read a good book than to write a poor one; and I've done so much mixed reading in my time that my mind is full of echoes and voices of better men. But this book I'm worrying about now really deserves to be written, I think, for it has a message of its own.

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

A girl of 19 doesn't react towards things. She explodes.

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

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

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

Cherish all your happy moments: they make a fine cushion for old age.

I think reading a good book makes one modest. When you see the marvelous insight into human nature which a truly great book shows, it is bound to make you feel small
like looking at the Big Dipper on a clear night, or seeing the winter sunrise when you go out to collect the morning eggs. And anything that makes you feel small is mighty good for you.

The fact that Holmes had earlier lodgings in Montague Street (alongside the British Museum) is forgotten. That was before Watson and we must have Watson too.

What is the virtue and service of a book? Only to help me live less gingerly and shabbily.

I went to the theatre with the author of a successful play. He insisted on explaining everything. He told me what to watch, the details of the direction, the errors of the property man, the foibles of the star. He anticipated all of my surprises and ruined the evening. Never again! And mark you, the greatest author of all made no such mistake.

It is so easy to let life go by us in its swift amusing course, that sometimes it hardly seems worthwhile to attempt any bold strokes for truth. Truth, of course, does not need assistance; it can afford to ignore our errors. But in this quiet place, among the whisper of the trees, I seem to have heard a disconcerning sound. I have heard laughter, and I think it is the laughter of God.

only as idiocy! I hope that you will write to tell me along what curves your mind is moving. For my own part I feel that we are on the verge of amazing things. Long ago I fell back on books as the only permanent consolers. They are the one stainless and unimpeachable achievement of the human race. It saddens me to think that I shall have to die with thousands of books unread that would have given me noble and unblemished happiness. I will tell you a secret. I have never read King Lear, and have purposely refrained from doing so. If I were ever very ill I would only need to say to myself "You can't die yet, you haven't read Lear." That would bring me round, I know it would. You

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.

The misfortunes hardest to bear are these which never came.

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.

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.

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

Wars are won in the mind before they can be won on the field.