Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Christopher Morley, fully Christopher Darlington Morley

American Novelist, Journalist, Essayist

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

"Remorse is surgical in action; it cuts away foul tissues of the mind."

"If one were given five minutes' warning before sudden death, five minutes to say what it had all meant to us, every telephone booth would be occupied by people trying to call up other people to stammer that they loved them."

"Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it."

"No man is lonely while eating spaghetti - it requires so much attention."

"Nothing ages people like not thinking."

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

"The unluckiest insolvent in the world is the man whose expenditure of speech is too great for his income of ideas."

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

"Truth is always twins; for every truth is accompanied by its facsimile error - which is the application of that by literal-minded people."

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

"Read ever day something no one else is reading. Think something no one else is thinking. It is bad for the mind to be always a part of unanimity."

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

"Half-truths to which men are accustomed are so much easier to pass than the golden mintage they rarely encounter!"

"The poet is the reporter interviewing his own heart."

"When you give someone a book, you don't give him just paper, ink, and glue. You give him the possibility of a whole new life."