Christopher Morley
Man is unconquerable because he can make even his helplessness so entertaining. His motto seems to be "Even though He slay me, yet will I make fun of Him!Collection: Fun
A mind too proud to unbend over the small ridiculosa of life is as painful as a library with no trash in it.Collection: Mind
Living in a bookshop is like living in a warehouse of explosives. Those shelves are ranked with the most furious combustibles in the world--the brains of men.Collection: Men
Any man worth his salt has by the time he is forty-five accumulated a crown of thorns, and the problem is to learn to wear it over one ear.Collection: Men
It will be a shock to men when they realize that thoughts that were fast enough for today are not fast enough for tomorrow. But thinking tomorrow's thoughts today is one kind of future life.Collection: Life
Man makes a great fuss about this planet which is only a ballbearing in the hub of the universe.Collection: Men
Truth is what every man sees lurking at the bottom of his own soul, like the oyster shell housewives put in the kitchen kettle to collect the lime from the water. By and by each man's iridescent oyster shell of Truth becomes coated with the lime of prejudice and hearsay.Collection: Men
The human mind appears suddenly and inexplicably out of some unknown and unimaginable void. It passes half its known life in the mental chaos of sleep. Even when awake it is a victim of its own ill-adjustment, of disease, of age, of external suggestion, of nature's compulsions; it doubts its own sensations and trusts only in instruments and averages.Collection: Sleep
The world, in its sheer exuberance of kindness, will try to bury the poet with warm and lovely human trivialities. It will even ask him to autograph books.Collection: Kindness
There is an innate decorum in man, and it is not fair to thrust Truth upon people when they don't expect it. Only the very generous are ready for Truth impromptu.Collection: Truth
Blessed is the satirist; and blessed the ironist; blessed the witty scoffer, and blessed the sentimentalist; for each, having seen one spoke of the wheel, thinks to have seen all, and is content.Collection: Witty
There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love, and like that colossal adventure it is an experience of great social import. Even as the tranced swain, the booklover yearns to tell others of his bliss. He writes letters about it, adds it to the postscript of all manner of communications, intrudes it into telephone messages, and insists on his friends writing down the title of the find. Like the simple-hearted betrothed, once certain of his conquestCollection: Falling In Love
New York is Babylon : Brooklyn is the truly Holy City. New York is the city of envy, office work, and hustle; Brooklyn is the region of homes and happiness.... There is no hope for New Yorkers, for their glory in Their skyscraping sins; but in Brooklyn there is the wisdom of the lowly.Collection: New York
Poetry comes with anger, hunger and dismay; it does not often visit groups of citizens sitting down to be literary together, and would appal them if it did.Collection: Poetry
A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by.Collection: Religion
There are certain people whom one feels almost inclined to urge to hurry up and die so that their letters can be published.Collection: People
How womanly it is to ask the unanswerable at the moment impossible.Collection: Women
Never write up your diary on the day itself, for it takes longer than that to know what happened.Collection: Writing
Truth and Beauty (perhaps Keats was wrong in identifying them: perhaps they have the relation of Wit and Humour, or Rain and Rainbow) are of interest only to hungry people. There are several kinds of hunger. If Socrates, Spinoza, and Santayana had had free access to a midnight icebox we would never have heard of them. Shall I be ashamed of my little mewing truths?... I ask to be forgiven: they are such tiny ones.Collection: Philosophy
Mr. Gilbert had the earnest mania for self-improvement which has blighted the lives of so many young men.Collection: Men
Being in a hurry seems so fiercely important when you yourself are the hurrier and so comically ludicrous when it is someone else.Collection: Important
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.Collection: Book
Perhaps this is an age when men think bravely of the human spirit; for surely they have a strange lust to lay it bare.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Wish
Animal crackers, and cocoa to drink That is the finest of suppers, I think When I'm grown up and can have what I please, I think I shall always insist upon these.Collection: Food
Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.Collection: Running
The censure of a dog is something no man can stand.Collection: Dog
America is still a government of the naive, for the naive, and by the naive. He who does not know this, nor relish it, has no inkling of the nature of his country.Collection: Country
What is the virtue and service of a book? Only to help me live less gingerly and shabbily.Collection: Book
April prepares her green traffic light and the world thinks Go.Collection: Easter
Happiness is surely the best teacher of good manners: only the unhappy are churlish in deportment.Collection: Teacher
Friendships do not grow up in any carefully tended and contemplated fashion.... They begin haphazard.Collection: Friendship
Why do they put the Gideon Bibles only in the bedrooms, where it's usually too late...?Collection: Gideon
Truth, like milk, arrives in the dark But even so, wise dogs don't bark. Only mongrels make it hard For the milkman to come up the yard.Collection: Wise
Continually one faces the horrible matter of making decisions. The solution is, as far as possible, to avoid conscious rational decisions and choices; simply to do what you find yourself doing; to float in the great current of life with as little friction as possible; to allow things to settle themselves, as indeed they do with the most infallible certainty.Collection: Decision
They go in [to the library] not because they need any certain volume but because they feel that there may be some book that needs them.Collection: Book
Be prepared for truth at all hours and in the most fantastic disguises. This is the only safety.Collection: Truth
Religion is an attempt, a noble attempt, to suggest in human terms more-than-human realities.Collection: Reality
The unluckiest insolvent in the world is the man whose expenditure of speech is too great for his income of ideas.Collection: Men
The world has been printing books for 450 years, and yet gunpowder still has a wider circulation. Never mind! Printer's ink is the greater explosive: it will win.Collection: Book
The plural of spouse is spice.Collection: Funny
Blessed is he who has never been tempted; for he knows not the frailty of his rectitude.Collection: Blessed
The man who never in his life Has washed the dishes with his wife Or polished up the silver plate - He still is largely celibate.Collection: Marriage
The evening papers print what they do and get away with it because by afternoon the human mind is ruined anyhow.Collection: Media
Fifty percent of the world are women, yet they always seem a novelty.Collection: Women
When Abraham Lincoln was murdered The one thing that interested Matthew Arnold Was that the assassin shouted in Latin As he lept on the stage This convinced Matthew There was still hope for America.Collection: Education
Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a 'good' book. A book is 'good' only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error.Collection: Book
Truth is the ricochet of a prejudice bouncing off a fact.Collection: Truth
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.Collection: Morning