Christopher Morley Quotes

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

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.

When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night—there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean.

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.

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

There is only one success-to be able to spend life in your own way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean.

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Long ago I fell back on books as the only permanent consolers. They are the one stainless and unimpeachable achievement of the human race. It saddens me to think that I shall have to die with thousands of books unread that would have given me noble and unblemished happiness.

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. A book that is good for me would very likely be punk for you.

Summer was over, and we were no longer young, but there were great things before us.

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

There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning, and yearning. A man should be learning as he goes; and he should be earning bread for himself and others; and he should be yearning, too: yearning to know the unknowable.

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

There is only one success — to be able to spend your life in your own way.

I wish there could be an international peace conference of booksellers, for (you will smile at this) my own conviction is that the future happiness of the world depends in no small measure on them and on the librarians.

There are three ingredients to the good life; learning, earning, and yearning.

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!

There is only one success: to be able to spend life in your own way and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it.

Calling us men doesn't make us men. No creature on earth has a right to think himself a human being if he doesn't know at least one good book.

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.

ON THE RETURN OF A BOOK LENT TO A FRIEND I GIVE humble and hearty thanks for the safe return of this book which having endured the perils of my friend's bookcase, and the bookcases of my friend's friends, now returns to me in reasonably good condition. I GIVE humble and hearty thanks that my friend did not see fit to give this book to his infant as a plaything, nor use it as an ash-tray for his burning cigar, nor as a teething-ring for his mastiff. WHEN I lent this book I deemed it as lost: I was resigned to the bitterness of the long parting: I never thought to look upon its pages again. BUT NOW that my book is come back to me, I rejoice and am exceeding glad! Bring hither the fatted morocco and let us rebind the volume and set it on the shelf of honour: for this my book was lent, and is returned again. PRESENTLY, therefore, I may return some of the books that I myself have borrowed.

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

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.

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.

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

Oh, silly woman! Leave your stove, your pots and pans and chores, even if only for one day! Come out and see the sun in the sky and the river in the distance!

Man is unconquerable because he can make even his helplessness so entertaining. His motto seems to be "Even though He slay me, yet will I make fun of Him!

The misfortunes hardest to bear are these which never came.

What absurd victims of contrary desires we are! If a man is settled in one place he yearns to wander; when he wanders he yearns to have a home. And yet how bestial is content—all the great things in life are done by discontented people.

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.

That's when a woman finds herself--when she's in love. I don't care if she is old or fat or homely or prosy. She feels that little flutter under her ribs and she drops from the tree like a ripe plum.

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

Big shots are just little shots that keep shooting.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

The human mind appears suddenly and inexplicably out of some unknown and unimaginable void. It passes half its known life in the mental chaos of sleep. Even when awake it is a victim of its own ill-adjustment, of disease, of age, of external suggestion, of nature's compulsions; it doubts its own sensations and trusts only in instruments and averages.

There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love, and like that colossal adventure it is an experience of great social import. Even as the tranced swain, the booklover yearns to tell others of his bliss. He writes letters about it, adds it to the postscript of all manner of communications, intrudes it into telephone messages, and insists on his friends writing down the title of the find. Like the simple-hearted betrothed, once certain of his conquest, “I want you to love her, too!” It is a jealous passion also. He feels a little indignant if he finds that any one else has discovered the book, too.

...but if you're smart you don't hold up your hand in class and ask to be called on.

It's one of the uncanniest things I know to watch a real book on its career―it follows you and follows you and drives you into a corner and makes you read it.

There is no one so grateful as the man to whom you have given just the book his soul needed and he never knew it.

Books are the immortality of the race, the father and mother of most that is worth while cherishing in our hearts. To spread good books about, to sow them on fertile minds, to propagate understanding and a carefulness of life and beauty, isn't that high enough mission for a man?

New York is Babylon : Brooklyn is the truly Holy City. New York is the city of envy, office work, and hustle; Brooklyn is the region of homes and happiness…. There is no hope for New Yorkers, for their glory in Their skyscraping sins; but in Brooklyn there is the wisdom of the lowly.

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

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

Life's a lot different from what people pretend. That's why pretending is fun. I used to think it was some special wickedness of my own that made such queer things happen. Now I'm beginning to guess that everybody's like that.

As far as I can see, a man who's fond of books never need starve!

Malnutrition of the reading faculty is a serious thing.   Let us prescribe for you.

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

It's in books that most of us learn how splendidly worth-while life is.

There is only one success—to be able to spend your life in your own way." —Christopher Morley

INFRACANINOPHILE. One who habitually champions the underdog. The creation of American writer Christopher Morley (1890–1957).

The plural of spouse is spice. —Christopher Morley

There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love, and like that colossal adventure it is an experience of great social import. Even as the tranced swain, the booklover yearns to tell others of his bliss.

It's funny how we hate to face realities. I knew a commuter once who rode in town every day on the 8.13. But he used to call it the 7.73. He said it made him feel more virtuous.

It always seemed to me that [Henry James] had a kind of rush of words to the head and never stopped to sort them out properly.

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

No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversations as a dog does

Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting.

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

I went to the theatre with the author of a successful play. He insisted on explaining everything. He told me what to watch, the details of the direction, the errors of the property man, the foibles of the star. He anticipated all of my surprises and ruined the evening. Never again! And mark you, the greatest author of all made no such mistake.

Poetry is like an unexpected noise in the night: the creak of a door, a footstep on the porch, the soft scuffle of a moth against the screen, which rouses every sense to an instant alert. So comes poetry to the drowsy mind, which startles a moment, wonders, and returns to sleep.

Do you know why people are reading more books now than ever before? Because the terrific catastrophe of the war has made them realize that their minds are ill. The world was suffering from all sorts of mental fevers and aches and disorders, and never knew it. Now our mental pangs are only too manifest. We are all reading, hungrily, hastily, trying to find out—after the trouble is over—what was the matter with our minds.

There is only one success: To be able to spend your life in your own way.

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.

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

Talkers never write. They go on talking." There

A girl of 19 doesn't react towards things. She explodes.

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.

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

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. -Christopher Morley

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.

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.

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, everyday, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.

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 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.

In the history of walking, many experts considering him (Wordsworth) the authentic originator of the long expedition. He was the first – at a time (the late eighteenth century) when walking was the lot of the poor, vagabonds and highwaymen, not to mention travelling showmen and pedlars – to conceive of the walk as a poetic act, a communion with Nature, fulfilment of the body, contemplation of the landscape. Christopher Morley wrote of him that he was ‘one of the first to use his legs in the service of philosophy’.

Vede, i libri contengono i pensieri e i sogni degli uomini, le loro speranze e i loro sforzi e tutti i loro ruoli immortali. È attraverso i libri che la maggior parte di noi arriva a comprendere quanto la vita sia magnificamente degna di essere vissuta. [...] I libri rappresentano l'immortalità della razza, il padre e la madre di tutto quanto merita di essere nutrito nei nostri cuori. Diffondere buoni libri, seminarli in cervelli fertili, propagare la comprensione e l'amore per la vita e per la bellezza, non è questa una missione abbastanza alta per un uomo? Il libraio è realmente lo stendardo della verità.

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.

You know at once, if you are clairvoyant in these matters (libre-voyant, one might say), when you have met your book. You may dally and evade, you may go on about your affairs, but the paragraph of prose your eye fell upon, or the snatch of verses, or perhaps only the spirit and flavour of the volume, more divined than reasonably noted, will follow you.

One of the penalties of being a human being is other human beings

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.

From my heel to my toe is a measured space of 29.7 centimetres or 11.7 inches. This is a unit of progress and it is also a unit of thought. 'I can only meditate when I am walking,' wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the fourth book of his 'Confessions', 'when I stop I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.' Søren Kierkegaard speculated that the mind might function optimally at the pedestrian pace of three miles per hour, and in a journal entry describes going out for a wander and finding himself 'so overwhelmed with ideas' that he 'could scarcely walk'. Christopher Morley wrote of Wordsworth as 'employ[ing] his legs as an instrument of philosophy' and Wordsworth of his own 'feeling intellect'. Nietzsche was typically absolute on the subject - 'Only those thoughts which come from 'walking' have a value' - and Wallace Stevens typically tentative: 'Perhaps / The truth depends on a walk around the lake.' In all of these accounts, walking is not the action by which one arrives at knowledge; it is itself the means of knowing.

Everywhere, as we go about our small business, we must discern the fingerprints of the gigantic plan, the orderly and inexorable routine with neither beginning nor end, in which death is but a preface to another birth, and birth the certain forerunner of another death.

It is so easy to let life go by us in its swift amusing course, that sometimes it hardly seems worthwhile to attempt any bold strokes for truth. Truth, of course, does not need assistance; it can afford to ignore our errors. But in this quiet place, among the whisper of the trees, I seem to have heard a disconcerning sound. I have heard laughter, and I think it is the laughter of God.