Top 103 Quotes & Sayings by Don Marquis

A hypocrite is a person who - but who isn't?

Honesty is a good thing, but it is not profitable to its possessor unless it is kept under control.

Some persons are likeable in spite of their unswerving integrity.

A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists.

Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.

Punctuality is one of the cardinal business virtues: always insist on it in your subordinates.

Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.

Fishing is a delusion entirely surrounded by liars in old clothes.

Did you ever notice that when a politician does get an idea he usually gets it all wrong.

A sequel is an admission that you've been reduced to imitating yourself.

An optimist is a guy that has never had much experience.

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

Prohibition makes you want to cry into your beer and denies you the beer to cry into.

By the time a bartender knows what drink a man will have before he orders, there is little else about him worth knowing.

Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.

It takes all sorts of people to make the underworld.

Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough.

We pay for the mistakes of our ancestors, and it seems only fair that they should leave us the money to pay with.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.

Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun.

An idea isn't responsible for the people who believe in it.

Man cannot be uplifted; he must be seduced into virtue.

The trouble with the public is that there is too much of it; what we need in public is less quantity and more quality.

Fate often puts all the material for happiness and prosperity into a man's hands just to see how miserable he can make himself with them.

Ours is a world where people don't know what they want and are willing to go through hell to get it.

One of the most important things to remember about infant care is: don't change diapers in midstream.

A demagogue is a person with whom we disagree as to which gang should mismanage the country.

When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?'

Successful people are the ones who think up things for the rest of the world to keep busy at.

Bores bore each other too; but it never seems to teach them anything.

Every cloud has its silver lining but it is sometimes a little difficult to get it to the mint.

The art of newspaper paragraphing is to stroke a platitude until it purrs like an epigram.

Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever.

There is nothing so habit-forming as money.

There is luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel no one else has a right to blame us.

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

I have often noticed that ancestors never boast of the descendants who boast of ancestors. I would rather start a family than finish one. Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.

The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race.

In order to influence a child, one must be careful not to be that child's parent or grandparent.

Of middle age the best that can be said is that a middle-aged person has likely learned how to have a little fun in spite of his troubles.

In all systems of theology the devil figures as a male person. Yes, it is women who keep the church going.

I would rather start a family than finish one.

It wont be long now it wont be long man is making deserts of the earth it wont be long now before man will have used it up so that nothing but ants and centipedes and scorpions can find a living on it.

Between the years of ninety-two and a hundred and two, however, we shall be the ribald, useless, drunken, outcast person we have always wished to be. We shall have a long white beard and long white hair; we shall not walk at all, but recline in a wheel chair and bellow for alcoholic beverages; in the winter we shall sit before the fire with our feet in a bucket of hot water, a decanter of corn whiskey near at hand, and write ribald songs against organized society... We look forward to a disreputable, vigorous, unhonoured, and disorderly old age.

If a child shows himself incorrigible, he should be decently and quietly beheaded at the age of twelve, lest he grow to maturity, marry, and perpetuate his kind.

Man cannot be uplifted; he must be seduced into virtue

There is bound to be a certain amount of trouble running any country. If you are president, the trouble happens to you. But if you are a tyrant you can arrange things so that most of the trouble happens to other people.

When you can't have anything else, you can have virtue.

Insects have their own point of view about civilization a man thinks he amounts to a great deal but to a flea or a mosquito a human being is merely something good to eat.

Nearly every night before I go to bed I ask myself, "Have I vibrated in tune with the Infinite today, or have I failed?

I suppose the human race is doing the best it can but hells bells thats only an explanation its not an excuse.

The most pleasant and useful persons are those who leave some of the problems of the universe for God to worry about.

There is always a comforting thought in time of trouble when it is not our trouble.

It has been my observation and experience, and that of my family, that nothing human works out well.

personally my ambition is to get my time as a cockroach shortened for good behavior and be promoted to a revenue officer it is not much of a step up but i am humble

What man calls civilization always results in deserts.

Too many creatures both insects and humans estimate their own value by the amount of minor irritation they are able to cause to greater personalities than themselves.

I once heard the survivors of a colony of ants that had been partially obliterated by a cow's foot seriously debating the intention of the gods towards their civilization.