Christopher Morley Quotes

"A human being: an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing."

"A man who has never made a woman angry is a failure in life."

"Act like you expect to get into the end zone."

"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."

"Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting."

"Cleanliness is indeed next to godliness."

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"If we discovered that we only had five minutes left to say all that we wanted to say, every telephone booth would be occupied by people calling other people to stammer that they loved them."

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

"Let me look at the foulness and ugliness of my body. Let me see myself as an ulcerous sore running with every horrible and disgusting poison."

"Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it."

"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."

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

"New York, the nation's thyroid gland."

"No man is lonely eating spaghetti; it requires so much attention."

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

"Only the sinner has the right to preach."

"People like to imagine that because all our mechanical equipment moves so much faster, that we are thinking faster, too."

"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."

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

"The misfortunes hardest to bear are these which never came."

"There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning and yearning."

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

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

"We've had bad luck with our kids - they've all grown up."

"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."