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Christopher Morley Quotes: 12

  • 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.

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

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

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

    Pipefuls
  • Act like you expect to get into the end zone.

  • 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.

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

  • That's what this country needs -- more books!

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

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

  • 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.