A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Criticism
People like to imagine that because all our mechanical equipment moves so much faster, that we are thinking faster, too.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Thinking
Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Life and Living, Life
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
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
If a relationship is to evolve, it must go through a series of endings.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Beginning
Blessed is he who has never been tempted; for he knows not the frailty of his rectitude.
—Christopher Morley
Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Beauty
My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Religion, Universe
Loafing needs no explanation and is its own excuse.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Laziness, Stress
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 enemies of the truth are always awfully nice.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Truth
Cherish all your happy moments; they make a fine cushion for old age.
—Christopher Morley
It is unfair to blame man too fiercely for being pugnacious; he learned the habit from Nature.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Wildlife
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
High heels were invented by a woman who had been kissed on the forehead.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Fashion
In every man’s heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Beauty
There is only one success—to be able to spend your own life in your own way.
—Christopher Morley
New York, the nation’s thyroid gland.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Cities, City Life
There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning, and yearning.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Happiness, Goals, Life, Aspirations
Heavy hearts, like heavy clouds in the sky, are best relieved by the letting of a little water.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Water, Crying
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
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 man who has never made a woman angry is a failure in life.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Romance
The big shots are only the little shots who keep shooting.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Success, Perseverance, Endurance, Success & Failure, Resolve, Persistence
The courage of the poets is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Poets, Poetry
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: Mind, Thinking, Reading, Originality, Knowledge
Only the sinner has the right to preach.
—Christopher Morley
We’ve had bad luck with our kids—they’ve all grown up.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Children
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.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Books
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 Journalist
- 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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