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, Humor
No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as the dog does.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Genius, Dogs
The big shots are only the little shots who keep shooting.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Success & Failure, Persistence, Perseverance, Resolve, Endurance, Success
There is only one success—to be able to spend your own life in your own way.
—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
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
My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Religion, Universe
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
Big shots are little shots who kept shooting.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Leadership, Work, Success
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.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Dancing, Dance
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
Things of the spirit differ from things material in that the more you give the more you have.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Helping
New York, the nation’s thyroid gland.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Cities, City Life
Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Beauty
Heavy hearts, like heavy clouds in the sky, are best relieved by the letting of a little water.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Water, Crying
Man makes a great fuss about this planet which is only a ballbearing in the hub of the universe.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Earth
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
It is unfair to blame man too fiercely for being pugnacious; he learned the habit from Nature.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Wildlife
Loafing needs no explanation and is its own excuse.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Stress, Laziness
No man is lonely while eating spaghetti; it requires so much attention.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Attention, Eating, Food
Blessed is he who has never been tempted; for he knows not the frailty of his rectitude.
—Christopher Morley
The enemies of the future are always the very nicest people.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Enemies, Enemy
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
People like to imagine that because all our mechanical equipment moves so much faster, that we are thinking faster, too.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Thinking
A man who has never made a woman angry is a failure in life.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Romance
If a relationship is to evolve, it must go through a series of endings.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Beginning
Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Life and Living, Life
To hear the addled citizens at their mirth—their lewd and lackwit innocent noble mirth.
—Christopher Morley
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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Carl Bernstein American Journalist
- H. L. Mencken American Journalist, Literary Critic
- Katherine Anne Porter American Writer
- Barbara Grizzuti Harrison American Author
- Walt Whitman American Poet
- 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
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