Christopher Morley Quotes

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“When you sell a man a book you don't sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life.”

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

“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.”

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

“Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years.”

“But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.”

“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.”

“No man is lonely while eating spaghetti:
it requires so much attention.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“Philadelphia was the first city to foresee the advantages of a Federal constitution and oatmeal as a breakfast food.”

“Why do they put the Gideon Bibles only in the bedrooms, where it's usually too late, and not in the barroom downstairs?”

“My theology, briefly,
Is that the Universe
Was Dictated
But not Signed.”

“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.”

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

“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.”