Christopher Morley Quotes

Very often human beings don't become available for the purposes of art until they have shaken off some of their dogged, self-preserving sanity.

No man is lonely while eating spaghetti:
it requires so much attention.

The fact that Holmes had earlier lodgings in Montague Street (alongside the British Museum) is forgotten. That was before Watson and we must have Watson too.

"The freedom of the city"a phrase he had somewhere heardechoed in his mind. The freedom of the city! A magnificent saying, Electric signs, first burning wanly in the pink air, then brightened and grew strong. "Not light, but rather darkness visible," in that magic hour that just holds the balance between paling day and the spendthrift jewellery of evening.

My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated, but not signed.

Do you know why people are reading more books now than ever before? Because the terrific catastrophe of the war has made them realize that their minds are ill. The world was suffering from all sorts of mental fevers and aches and disorders, and never knew it. Now our mental pangs are only too manifest. We are all reading, hungrily, hastily, trying to find out — after the trouble is over — what was the matter with our minds.

It is so easy to let life go by us in its swift amusing course, that sometimes it hardly seems worthwhile to attempt any bold strokes for truth. Truth, of course, does not need assistance; it can afford to ignore our errors. But in this quiet place, among the whisper of the trees, I seem to have heard a disconcerning sound. I have heard laughter, and I think it is the laughter of God.

For paradise in the world to come is uncertain, but there is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven we inhabit when we read a good book.

People need books, but they don't know they need them. Generally they are not aware that the books they need are in existence. - Roger Mifflin

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.

Sometimes I thought Truth had vanished from the earth,” he cried bitterly. “Like everything else, it was rationed by the governments. I taught myself to disbelieve half of what I read in the papers.

A good book ought to have something simple about it. And, like Eve, it ought to come from somewhere near the third rib: there ought to be a heart beating in it. A story that's all forehead doesn't amount to much.

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

Heavy hearts, like heavy clouds in the sky, are best relieved by the letting of a little water.

What absurd victims of contrary desires we are! If a man is settled in one place he yearns to wander; when he wanders he yearns to have a home. And yet how bestial is content — all the great things in life are done by discontented people.