Top 120 Christopher Morley Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The misfortunes hardest to bear are these which never came.”

— Christopher Morley

52. “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

53. “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.”

— Christopher Morley

54. “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.”

— Christopher Morley

55. “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.”

— Christopher Morley

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

— Christopher Morley

57. “Truth is the ricochet of a prejudice bouncing off a fact.”

— Christopher Morley

58. “The world, in its sheer exuberance of kindness, will try to bury the poet with warm and lovely human trivialities. It will even ask him to autograph books.”

— Christopher Morley

59. “The little Plumpuppets are fairies of beds; They have nothing to do but watch sleepyheads; They turn down the sheets and they tuck you in tight, And dance on your pillow to wish you good night!”

— Christopher Morley

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

— Christopher Morley

61. “The evening papers print what they do and get away with it because by afternoon the human mind is ruined anyhow.”

— Christopher Morley

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

— Christopher Morley

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

— Christopher Morley

64. “The man who never in his life Has washed the dishes with his wife Or polished up the silver plate – He still is largely celibate.”

— Christopher Morley

65. “There are a lot of people who must have the table laid in the usual fashion or they will not enjoy the dinner.”

— Christopher Morley

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

— Christopher Morley

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

— Christopher Morley

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

— Christopher Morley

69. “God made man merely to hear some praise of what he’d done on those Five Days.”

— Christopher Morley

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

— Christopher Morley

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

— Christopher Morley

72. “For paradise in the world to come is uncertain, but there is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven which we inhabit when we read a good book.”

— Christopher Morley

73. “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.”

— Christopher Morley

74. “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.”

— Christopher Morley

75. “The everlasting lure of round-the-corner, how fascinating it is.”

— Christopher Morley

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

— Christopher Morley

77. “We’ve had bad luck with our kids – they’ve all grown up.”

— Christopher Morley

78. “When Abraham Lincoln was murdered The one thing that interested Matthew Arnold Was that the assassin shouted in Latin As he lept on the stage This convinced Matthew There was still hope for America.”

— Christopher Morley

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

— Christopher Morley

80. “The most interesting persons are always those who have nothing special to do: children, nurses, policemen and actors at 11 o’clock in the morning.”

— Christopher Morley

81. “Why do they put the Gideon bibles only in the bedrooms, where it’s usually too late?”

— Christopher Morley

82. “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.”

— Christopher Morley

83. “The trouble with wedlock is that there’s not enough wed and too much lock.”

— Christopher Morley

84. “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.”

— Christopher Morley

85. “Beware of the conversationalist who adds “in other words.” He is merely starting afresh.”

— Christopher Morley

86. “That’s what this country needs – more books!”

— Christopher Morley

87. “One of the penalties of being a human being is other human beings.”

— Christopher Morley

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

— Christopher Morley

89. “Oh, sir, I’m glad you got home in time for Christmas,” she said. “The children were counting on it. Did you have a successful trip, sir?” “Every trip is successful when you get home again,” said Gissing.”

— Christopher Morley

90. “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.”

— Christopher Morley

91. “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.”

— Christopher Morley

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

— Christopher Morley

93. “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.”

— Christopher Morley

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

— Christopher Morley

95. “Overhead the night was a superb arch of clear frost, sifted with stars.”

— Christopher Morley

96. “None of the neighbouring ladies would stand as godmother, for they were secretly dubious as to the children’s origin; so he had asked good Mrs. Spaniel to act in that capacity. She, a simple kindly creature, was much flattered, though certainly she can have understood very little of the symbolical rite. Gissing, filling out the form that Mr. Poodle had given him, had put down the names of an entirely imaginary brother and sister-in-law of his, “deceased,” whom he asserted as the parents.”

— Christopher Morley

97. “Gissing lived alone.”

— Christopher Morley

98. “Human beings pay very little attention to what is told them unless they know something about it already.”

— Christopher Morley

99. “The beauty of being a bookseller is that you don’t have to be a literary critic: all you have to do to books is enjoy them.”

— Christopher Morley

100. “A good book ought to have something simple about it. And, like Eve, it ought to come from somewhere near the third rib: there ought to be a heart beating in it. A story that’s all forehead doesn’t amount to much.”

— Christopher Morley