Life & Wisdom Quote by Christopher Morley

Morley’s line is theology as side-eye: a neat little swivel from reverence to insinuation. The joke lands because it turns the Creation story into a creator’s most human weakness - the need for applause. “Merely” is the blade. It shrinks mankind’s cosmic significance into the role of an audience member, a clapping machine commissioned after the real work was finished. And “those Five Days” is an extra pinch of irreverence: Morley airily compresses Genesis, treating divine labor like a brisk workweek, leaving the famous seventh day and its sanctity offstage. The omission reads like a smirk.

The intent isn’t simple blasphemy; it’s a comic demotion of piety’s usual posture. Morley was a literary man of the early 20th century, writing in an era when modernity had started tugging hard at inherited certainties. His sensibility is urbane, bookish, gently iconoclastic: the kind of wit that lets you keep cultural Christianity as a shared reference point while poking at its ego-protecting parts.

Subtextually, it’s about artists, critics, and the economy of praise. Anyone who has built something - a novel, a career, a self - recognizes the itch to have it admired, preferably by someone “made” to admire it. By putting that itch in God, Morley exposes how often our loftiest stories mirror our most ordinary hungers. The line works because it risks offense in order to tell a sharper truth: authority loves gratitude, and creation is never entirely free of vanity.