Christopher Morley Quotes

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

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

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.

That's what this country needs - more books!

The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.

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.

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.

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 doctor is advertised by the bodies he cures. My business is advertised by the minds I stimulate. And let me tell you that the book business is different from other trades. People don't know they want books. I can see just by looking at you that your mind is ill for lack of books but you are blissfully unaware of it!

A good book ought to have something simple about it. And, like Eve, it ought to come from somewhere near the third rib: there ought to be a heart beating in it. A story that's all forehead doesn't amount to much.

People need books, but they don't know they need them. Generally they are not aware that the books they need are in existence. - Roger Mifflin

There is no one so grateful as the man to whom you have given just the book his soul needed and he never knew it. - Roger Mifflin

There are only about 30,000 really important books in the world. I suppose about 5,000 of them were written in the English language, and 5,000 more have been translated. - Roger Mifflin

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

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

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

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

If we discovered that we had only 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.

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

Life's a lot different from what people pretend. That's why pretending is fun. I used to think it was some special wickedness of my own that made such queer things happen. Now I'm beginning to guess that everybody's like that.