Top 120 Christopher Morley Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There is only one success – to be able to spend your life in your own way.”

— Christopher Morley

Featured in: Happy Quotes, Satisfaction Quotes, Freedom Quotes, Being Yourself Quotes, Being Happy Quotes

2. “Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting.”

— Christopher Morley

Featured in: Perseverance Quotes, Famous Quotes, Short Quotes, Clever Quotes, Witty Quotes

3. “There is only one rule for being a good talker – learn to listen.”

— Christopher Morley

4. “In every man’s heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.”

— Christopher Morley

Featured in: Beauty Quotes

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

— Christopher Morley

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

— Christopher Morley

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

— Christopher Morley

8. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

9. “All students can learn.”

— Christopher Morley

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

— Christopher Morley

11. “Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking.”

— Christopher Morley

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— Christopher Morley

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

— Christopher Morley

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

— Christopher Morley

15. “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.”

— Christopher Morley

16. “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.”

— Christopher Morley

17. “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

18. “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.”

— Christopher Morley

19. “Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.”

— Christopher Morley

20. “There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.”

— Christopher Morley

21. “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.”

— Christopher Morley

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

— Christopher Morley

23. “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.”

— Christopher Morley

24. “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

25. “The plural of spouse is spice.”

— Christopher Morley

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

— Christopher Morley

27. “A human being: an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.”

— Christopher Morley

28. “New York, the nation’s thyroid gland.”

— Christopher Morley

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

— Christopher Morley

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

— Christopher Morley

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

— Christopher Morley

32. “Only the sinner has the right to preach.”

— Christopher Morley

33. “If you have to keep reminding yourself of a thing, perhaps it isn’t so.”

— Christopher Morley

34. “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

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

— Christopher Morley

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

— Christopher Morley

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

— Christopher Morley

38. “The enemies of the future are always the very nicest people.”

— Christopher Morley

39. “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

40. “Act like you expect to get into the end zone.”

— Christopher Morley

41. “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

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

— Christopher Morley

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

— Christopher Morley

44. “Religion is an attempt, a noble attempt, to suggest in human terms more-than-human realities.”

— Christopher Morley

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

— Christopher Morley

46. “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.”

— Christopher Morley

47. “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

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

— Christopher Morley

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

— Christopher Morley

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

— Christopher Morley