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
Things of the spirit differ from things material in that the more you give the more you have.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Helping
My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Universe, Religion
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
A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Criticism
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
Cherish all your happy moments; they make a fine cushion for old age.
—Christopher Morley
In every man’s heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Beauty
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
To hear the addled citizens at their mirth—their lewd and lackwit innocent noble mirth.
—Christopher Morley
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.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Truth
Only the sinner has the right to preach.
—Christopher Morley
The courage of the poets is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Poetry, Poets
Lots of times you have to pretend to join a parade in which you’re not really interested in order to get where you’re going.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Realism
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
April prepares her green traffic light and the world thinks Go.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Seasons
Blessed is he who has never been tempted; for he knows not the frailty of his rectitude.
—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
No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as the dog does.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Dogs, Genius
No man is lonely while eating spaghetti; it requires so much attention.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Attention, Eating, Food
Heavy hearts, like heavy clouds in the sky, are best relieved by the letting of a little water.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Water, Crying
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
The enemies of the future are always the very nicest people.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Enemies, Enemy
Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Beauty
Such little, puny things are words in rhyme: poor feeble loops and strokes as frail as hairs.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Words
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: Reading, Knowledge, Thinking, Originality, Mind
High heels were invented by a woman who had been kissed on the forehead.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Fashion
It is unfair to blame man too fiercely for being pugnacious; he learned the habit from Nature.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Wildlife
Man makes a great fuss about this planet which is only a ballbearing in the hub of the universe.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Earth
Loafing needs no explanation and is its own excuse.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Stress, Laziness
People like to imagine that because all our mechanical equipment moves so much faster, that we are thinking faster, too.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Thinking
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