C. Morley Quotes

The ball is man's most disastrous invention, not excluding the wheel.

The British tourist is always happy abroad as long as the natives are waiters.

Dancing is a wonderful training for girls, it's the first way you learn to guess what a man is going to do before he does it.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

Men talk of "finding God," but no wonder it is difficult; He is hidden in that darkest hiding-place, your heart. You yourself are a part of Him.

A party: one arrives long after it's started, and one's going to leave long before it's over.

Socialism and federalism are necessarily political opposites, because the former demands that centralized concentration of power which the latter by definition denies.

What is the virtue and service of a book? Only to help me live less gingerly and shabbily.

Every child should be placed on a doorstep to sell something. It's the best possible training for life.

Pop music is not just a clumsy mass fanaticism, connected to a deceitful enchantment totally lacking in moral rigour.

When I asked my accountant if anything could get me out of the mess I am in now, he thought for a long time, and I didn't care much for his answer. 'Yes,' he said. 'Death would help.'

Friendships do not grow up in any carefully tended and contemplated fashion.... They begin haphazard.

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.

Most owners are at length able to teach themselves to obey their dog.

It's a good thing to turn your mind upside down now and then, like an hour-glass, to let the particles run the other way.

Show me the man who has enjoyed his schooldays and I will show you a bully and a bore.

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.

Cowardice asks: Is it safe? Expediency asks: Is it politic? But Conscience asks: Is it right?

Animal crackers, and cocoa to drink That is the finest of suppers, I think When I'm grown up and can have what I please, I think I shall always insist upon these.

If you have to keep reminding yourself of a thing, perhaps it isn't so.

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

Why do they put the Gideon Bibles only in the bedrooms, where it's usually too late...?

In his lifetime the great French impressionist painter Corot painted 2000 canvases. Of that number, 3000 are in the United States.

Psychoanalysis comes down to the process itself - the self, and life. I think I can say that I'm friends with the unconscious life, but I've never tried to make a painting directly from a dream.

If in the paddock the owner is surrounded by a herd of young children, don't back his horse. But if the owner is accompanied by a beautiful lady, plunge to the hilt.

Arrogance and snobbism live in adjoining rooms and use a common currency.

What does it say about us that people who are considered defective are instinctively caring and compassionate?

Having power and being in a position of power can really blur your judgement, and it's not always that clear.

The censure of a dog is something no man can stand.

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

I would have tested the furniture if they'd asked me.

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.

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

The trouble with wedlock is that there's not enough wed and too much lock.

Art is a great means of self-discovery. One of the things that appealed to me in the beginning was that it was a great way to get girlfriends.

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking.

What has reality shows got to do with reality? It is beyond unreality; there is nothing real about it.

Truth, like milk, arrives in the dark But even so, wise dogs don't bark. Only mongrels make it hard For the milkman to come up the yard.

COUGHS. These are symptoms, not diseases. Take them to your doctor and he can give you something serious to worry about.

There is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven which we inhabit when we read a good book.

If people take the trouble to cook, you should take the trouble to eat.

The paintings have a lot to do with the idea of seeing and doing, and the relationship between your hand and your eye, and the object.

A right without an attendant responsibility is as unreal as a sheet of paper which has only one side.

I am not in this business as a calling. I don't do what I do to right any wrongs.

We call a child's mind 'small' simply by habit; perhaps it is larger than ours is, for it can take in almost anything without effort.

When I did that interview with Hepburn, the only ground rule was, you did not discuss Spencer Tracy. Spencer Tracy's widow is still alive, and she respected that.

Some people, you have to grit your teeth in order to stay in the same room as them, but you get on and ask the questions you assume most of the people watching want to ask.

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

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

You can be a great president and be ridden with flaws. Of course we know that.