Christopher Morley Quotes - Page 3

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

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

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

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.

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.

Truth is the ricochet of a prejudice bouncing off a fact.

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

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.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a 'good' book. A book is 'good' only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error.

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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

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!

Everybody thinks of others as being excessively human, with all the frailties and crotchets appertaining to that curious condition. But each of us also seems to regard himself as existing on a detached plane of observation, exempt (save in moments of avid crisis) from the strange whims of humanity en masse.

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

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