Quotes from Christopher Morley

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

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

A human being: an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

The evening papers print what they do and get away with it because by afternoon the human mind is ruined anyhow.

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

From now until the end of time no one else will ever see life with my eyes, and I mean to make the best of my chance.

Lord! when you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue — you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night — there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book.

And of all man's felicities The very subtlest one, say I, Is when for the first time he sees His hearthfire smoke against the sky.

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.

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

The plural of spouse is spice.

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

There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning, and yearning. A man should be learning as he goes; and he should be earning bread for himself and others; and he should be yearning, too: yearning to know the unknowable.

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. A book that is good for me would very likely be punk for you.

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.

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

Summer was over, and we were no longer young, but there were great things before us.

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

There are three ingredients to the good life; learning, earning, and yearning.

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.

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.

Calling us men doesn't make us men. No creature on earth has a right to think himself a human being if he doesn't know at least one good book.

The beauty of being a bookseller is that you don't have to be a literary critic: all you have to do to books is enjoy them.