Christopher Morley

“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.”

“That's what this country needs -- more books!”

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

“All students can learn.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The misfortunes hardest to bear are these which never came.”

“Only the sinner has the right to preach.”

“Even the most innocent of men's affairs seem doomed to cause suffering. Pushing the lawnmower through tall wet grass, and enjoying the strong aroma of the morning, I found that the blades had cut a frog in half. I have not forgotten his eyes.”

“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.”

“Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.”

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

“No man is lonely while eating spaghetti:it requires so much attention.”