Quotes from 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!

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.

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.

The unluckiest insolvent in the world is the man whose expenditure of speech is too great for his income of ideas.

Man makes a great fuss about this planet which is only a ballbearing in the hub of the universe.

Perhaps this is an age when men think bravely of the human spirit; for surely they have a strange lust to lay it bare.

It is unfair to blame man too fiercely for being pugnacious; he learned the habit from Nature.

The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.

The greatest poem ever known Is one all poets have outgrown: The poetry, innate, untold, Of being only four years old.

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.

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

The little Plumpuppets are fairies of beds; They have nothing to do but watch sleepyheads; They turn down the sheets and they tuck you in tight, And dance on your pillow to wish you good night!

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

What is the virtue and service of a book? Only to help me live less gingerly and shabbily.

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.

The plural of spouse is spice.

When you sell a man a book, you don't sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life.

We call a child's mind 'small' simply by habit; perhaps it is larger than ours is, for it can take in almost anything without effort.

The unluckiest insolvent in the world is the man whose expenditure is too great for his income of ideas.

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.

The trouble with wedlock is that there's not enough wed and too much lock.

A human being: an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.

Man, an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.

A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by.