Christopher Morley (5 May 1890 – 28 March 1957) was an American journalist, novelist, essayist and poet. He also produced stage productions for a few years and gave college lectures.
A critic is a gong at a railroad crossing clanging loudly and vainly as the train goes by.
God made man merely to hear some praise of what he'd done on those Five Days.
Friendships do not grow up in any carefully tended and contemplated fashion. . . . They begin haphazard.
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.
Standing by the crib of one's own baby, with that world - old pang of compassion and protectiveness toward this so little creature that has all its course to run, the heart flies back in yearning and gratitude to those who felt just so toward one's self. Then for the first time one understands the homely succession of sacrifices and pains by which life is transmitted and fostered down the stumbling generations of men.
Perhaps this is an age when men think bravely of the human spirit; for surely they have a strange lust to lay it bare.
Everybody thinks of others as being excessively human, with all the frailties and crotchets appertaining to that curious condition. But each of us also seems to regard himself as existing on a detached plane of observation, exempt (save in moments of avid crisis) from the strange whims of humanity en masse.
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.
Act like you expect to get into the end zone.
Only the sinner has the right to preach.
There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.
All students can learn.
Be prepared for truth at all hours and in the most fantastic disguises. This is the only safety.
Beware of the conversationalist who adds "in other words. " He is merely starting afresh.
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.
The trouble with wedlock is that there's not enough wed and too much lock.
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.
Blessed is he who has never been tempted; for he knows not the frailty of his rectitude.
Man makes a great fuss about this planet which is only a ballbearing in the hub of the universe.
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.