Christopher Morley Quotes

Those who have bound themselves are only too eager to see the chains on others.

I think reading a good book makes one modest. When you see the marvelous insight into human nature which a truly great book shows, it is bound to make you feel small — like looking at the Dipper on a clear night, or seeing the winter sunrise when you go out to collect the morning eggs. And anything that makes you feel small is mighty good for you.

They go in not because they need any certain volume but because they feel that there may be some book that needs them.

Malnutrition of the reading faculty is a serious thing. Let us prescribe for you.

There is no one so grateful as the man to whom you have given just the book his soul needed and he never knew it. - Roger Mifflin

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

Vede, i libri contengono i pensieri e i sogni degli uomini, le loro speranze e i loro sforzi e tutti i loro ruoli immortali. È attraverso i libri che la maggior parte di noi arriva a comprendere quanto la vita sia magnificamente degna di essere vissuta. [...] I libri rappresentano l'immortalità della razza, il padre e la madre di tutto quanto merita di essere nutrito nei nostri cuori. Diffondere buoni libri, seminarli in cervelli fertili, propagare la comprensione e l'amore per la vita e per la bellezza, non è questa una missione abbastanza alta per un uomo? Il libraio è realmente lo stendardo della verità.

I think any man would be a traitor to humanity who didn’t pledge every effort of his waking life to an attempt to make war impossible in future.

I wish there could be an international peace
conference of booksellers, for (you will smile at this) my own
conviction is that the future happiness of the world depends in no
small measure on them and on the librarians.

When you sell a man a book you don't sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue- you sell him a whole new life.
-Christopher Morley

Non esiste in astratto un buon libro: un libro è buono soltanto quando appaga una fame umana, o confuta qualche umano errore.

The everlasting lure of round-the-corner, how fascinating it is.

I think reading a good book makes one modest. When you see the marvelous insight into human nature which a truly great book shows, it is bound to make you feel small — like looking at the Big Dipper on a clear night, or seeing the winter sunrise when you go out to collect the morning eggs. And anything that makes you feel small is mighty good for you.

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.

The misfortunes hardest to bear are these which never came.