Christopher Morley Quotes

To laugh at cheap jests is as base as to pray to cheap gods.

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.

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

Gissing lived alone

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

Il paradiso del mondo di là è incerto, ma vi è effettivamente un cielo su questa terra, un cielo nel quale abitiamo tutti quando leggiamo un buon libro.

Each of us, desperately clutching his identity amid the impalatable onward pour of Time and Thought, finds only in art-and chiefly in written art- means to halt that ceaseless, cruel drift.

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.

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.

One of the penalties of being a human being is other human beings

Everywhere, as we go about our small business, we must discern the fingerprints of the gigantic plan, the orderly and inexorable routine with neither beginning nor end, in which death is but a preface to another birth, and birth the certain forerunner of another death.

This place may indeed be haunted,” he thought, “perhaps by the delighted soul of Sir Walter Raleigh, patron of the weed, but seemingly not by the proprietors.

"One of the things that struck him about the city was its heedlessness of Time. On every side he saw people spending it without adequate return. Perhaps he was young and doctrinaire: but he devised this theory for himselfall time is wasted that does not give you some awareness of beauty or wonder. In other words, "the days that make us happy make us wise," he said to himself, quoting Masefield's line. On that principle, he asked, how much time is wasted in this city? Well, here are some six million people. To simplify the problem (which is permitted to every philosopher) let us (he said) assume that 2,350,000 of those people have spent a day that could be called, on the whole, happy: a day in which they have had glimpses of reality; a day in which they feel satisfaction. (That was, he felt, a generous allowance. ) Very well, then, that leaves 3,650,000 people whose day has been unfruitful: spent in uncongenial work, or in sorrow, suffering, and talking nonsense. This city, then, in one day, has wasted 10,000 years, or 100 centuries. One hundred centuries squandered in a day! It made him feel quite ill, and he tore up the scrap of paper on which he had been figuring."

The mind, like a spinning flywheel of fatigued steel, was gradually racked to bursting by the conflict of stresses. And yet: every equilibrium was an opposure of forces. Rotation, if swift enough, creates amazing stability: he had seen how the gyroscope can balance at apparently impossible angles. Perhaps it was so of the mind. If it twirls at high speed it can lean right out over the abyss without collapse. But the stationary mindhe thought of Bishop Borzoimust keep away from the edge. Try to force it to the edge, it raves in panic. Every mind, very likely, knows its own frailties, and does well to safeguard them.

I think reading a good book makes one modest. When you see the marvellous 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.