Christopher Morley Quotes - Page 2

A human being: an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.

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

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

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

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

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

The misfortunes hardest to bear are these which never came.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Only the sinner has the right to preach.

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.

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

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.