Christopher Morley's Quotes

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.

Beauty is ever to the lonely mind a shadow fleeting; she is never plain. She is a visitor who leaves behind the gift of grief, the souvenir of pain.

In every man's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.

No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as the dog does.

High heels were invented by a woman who had been kissed on the forehead.

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.

From now until the end of time no one else will ever see life with my eyes, and I mean to make the best of my chance.

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.

A human being: an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.

The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.

There is only one rule for being a good talker - learn to listen.

God made man merely to hear some praise of what he'd done on those Five Days.

The enemies of the future are always the very nicest people.

Act like you expect to get into the end zone.

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.

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.

The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.

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.

You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.

The great business of life is to be, to do, to do without and to depart.

Even good opinions are worth very little unless we hold them in the broad, intelligent, and spacious way.

A great interpreter of life ought not himself to need interpretation.

A proverb is good sense brought to a point.

Evolution is not a force but a process. Not a cause but a law.

He who hates vice hates men.

In politics the choice is constantly between two evils.

Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions.

No man can climb out beyond the limitations of his own character.

Politics is a field where the choice lies constantly between two blunders.

Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.

You cannot demonstrate an emotion or prove an aspiration.

They act as if they supposed that to be very sanguine about the general improvement of mankind is a virtue that relieves them from taking trouble about any improvement in particular.

They are the guiding oracles which man has found out for himself in that great business of ours, of learning how to be, to do, to do without, and to depart.