Christopher Darlington Morley (1890–1957) was an American novelist, essayist, and journalist. He authored more than 50 books, which are diverse but integrated by Morley’s personality.
Born in Haverford, Pennsylvania, Morley was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford’s New College 1910–13. He worked on Doubleday’s editorial staff 1913–17. He gained fame from his contributions to periodicals such as Ladies’ Home Journal, the New York Evening Post, and the Saturday Review of Literature.
Morley’s notable works, imaginative and lighthearted, include Parnassus on Wheels (1917) and its sequel The Haunted Bookshop (1919,) Thunder on the Left (1925,) Swiss Family Manhattan (1932,) Kitty Foyle (1939,) The Ironing Board (1949) and a book of poems, The Middle Kingdom (1944.)
Morley also edited Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (1937 and 1948.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Christopher Morley
In every man’s heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Beauty
Things of the spirit differ from things material in that the more you give the more you have.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Helping
A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Criticism
The enemies of the future are always the very nicest people.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Enemies
It is unfair to blame man too fiercely for being pugnacious; he learned the habit from Nature.
—Christopher Morley
My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Religion
There is only one success–to be able to spend your own life in your own way.
—Christopher Morley
Time is a flowing river. Happy those who allow themselves to be carried, unresisting, with the current. They float through easy days. They live, unquestioning, in the moment.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Time Management
I had a million questions to ask God: but when I met Him, they all fled my mind; and it didn’t seem to matter.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Heaven
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.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Perspective, Awareness
Cherish all your happy moments; they make a fine cushion for old age.
—Christopher Morley
The courage of the poets is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Poets, Poetry
Big shots are little shots who kept shooting.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Work, Success, Leadership
Man makes a great fuss about this planet which is only a ballbearing in the hub of the universe.
—Christopher Morley
To hear the addled citizens at their mirth — their lewd and lackwit innocent noble mirth.
—Christopher Morley
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.
—Christopher Morley
Heavy hearts, like heavy clouds in the sky, are best relieved by the letting of a little water.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Crying
The enemies of the truth are always awfully nice.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Truth
Such little, puny things are words in rhyme: poor feeble loops and strokes as frail as hairs.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Words
People like to imagine that because all our mechanical equipment moves so much faster, that we are thinking faster, too.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Thinking
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.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Decisions
The greatest poem ever known
Is one all poets have outgrown:
The poetry, innate, untold,
Of being only four years old.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Childhood
There is only one success – to be able to spend your life in your own way, and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it.
—Christopher Morley
New York, the nation’s thyroid gland.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Cities
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.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Books
The big shots are only the little shots who keep shooting.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Success & Failure, Resolve, Persistence, Success, Endurance, Perseverance
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 continually be part of unanimity.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Thinking, Originality, Reading, Knowledge
Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Life, Life and Living
We’ve had bad luck with our kids — they’ve all grown up.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Children
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
Only the sinner has the right to preach.
—Christopher Morley
April prepares her green traffic light and the world thinks Go.
—Christopher Morley
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Walt Whitman American Poet
H. L. Mencken American Journalist, Literary Critic
Carl Bernstein American Journalist
Katherine Anne Porter American Writer
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison American Journalist
G. K. Chesterton English Journalist
Henry Adams American Historian
Theodore H. White American Journalist
James Agee American Man of Letters
Italo Calvino Italian Novelist, Writer