Skip to content

Christopher Morley Quotes

1890–1957

Christopher Morley (5 May 1890 - 28 March 1957) was an American journalist, novelist, poet, and playwright.

Also known as: Morley, Christopher

Random Christopher Morley quote

17 quotes

Happiness is surely the best teacher of good manners: only the unhappy are churlish in deportment.

Where the Blue Begins (1922)

There is only one success … to be able to spend your life in your own way.

Where the Blue Begins (1922)

It's a good thing to turn your mind upside down now and then, like an hour-glass, to let the particles run the other way.

The Haunted Bookshop (1919)

The most interesting persons are always those who have nothing special to do: children, nurses, policemen and actors at 11 o'clock in the morning.

Travels in Philadelphia (1920)

Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it.

Thunder on the Left (1925)

But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.

The Haunted Bookshop (1919)

Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years.

The Haunted Bookshop (1919)

April prepares her green traffic light and the world thinks Go.

John Mistletoe (1931)

Philadelphia was the first city to foresee the advantages of a Federal constitution and oatmeal as a breakfast food.

Travels in Philadelphia (1920)

Why do they put the Gideon Bibles only in the bedrooms, where it's usually too late, and not in the barroom downstairs?

That's what makes it worth while — I'm doing something that nobody else from Nazareth, Maine, to Walla Walla, Washington, has ever thought of.

Parnassus on Wheels (1917)

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

"Jerry," said Roger, "You are a upas tree. Your shadow is poisonous!"

We visit bookshops not so often to buy any one special book, but rather to rediscover, in the happier and more expressive words of others, our own encumbered soul.

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.

An Enchanted Life : An Adept's Guide to Masterful Magick‎ (2001)

My theology, briefly,
Is that the Universe
Was Dictated
But not Signed.

A million hearts here wait our call,
All naked to our distant speech—
I wish that I could ring them all
And have some welcome news for each.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Christopher Morley (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.