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: Knowledge, Originality, Reading, Mind, Thinking
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
The big shots are only the little shots who keep shooting.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Persistence, Success, Perseverance, Endurance, Success & Failure, Resolve
To hear the addled citizens at their mirth—their lewd and lackwit innocent noble mirth.
—Christopher Morley
Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Beauty
A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Criticism
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
Blessed is he who has never been tempted; for he knows not the frailty of his rectitude.
—Christopher Morley
No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as the dog does.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Dogs, Genius
The courage of the poets is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Poetry, Poets
No man is lonely while eating spaghetti; it requires so much attention.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Food, Eating, Attention
Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Life, Life and Living
Cherish all your happy moments; they make a fine cushion for old age.
—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
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
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
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
Only the sinner has the right to preach.
—Christopher Morley
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
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
April prepares her green traffic light and the world thinks Go.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Seasons
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
The enemies of the truth are always awfully nice.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Truth
Man makes a great fuss about this planet which is only a ballbearing in the hub of the universe.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Earth
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
It is unfair to blame man too fiercely for being pugnacious; he learned the habit from Nature.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Wildlife
God made man merely to hear some praise of what he’d done on those Five Days.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Creation
In every man’s heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.
—Christopher Morley
Topics: Beauty
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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