Quotes by Don Marquis

• 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.
• Prohibition makes you want to cry into your beer and denies you the beer to cry into.
• Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.
• Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.
• Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
• One of the most important things to remember about infant care is: don't change diapers in midstream.
• Man cannot be uplifted; he must be seduced into virtue.
• Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
• There is nothing so habit-forming as money.
• Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever.
• Ours is a world where people don't know what they want and are willing to go through hell to get it.
• Punctuality is one of the cardinal business virtues: always insist on it in your subordinates.
• Some persons are likeable in spite of their unswerving integrity.
• Successful people are the ones who think up things for the rest of the world to keep busy at.
• The art of newspaper paragraphing is to stroke a platitude until it purrs like an epigram.
• The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race.
• There is luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel no one else has a right to blame us.
• We pay for the mistakes of our ancestors, and it seems only fair that they should leave us the money to pay with.
• When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?'
• Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
• Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough.
• It takes all sorts of people to make the underworld.
• The trouble with the public is that there is too much of it; what we need in public is less quantity and more quality.
• An optimist is a guy that has never had much experience.
• An idea isn't responsible for the people who believe in it.
• In order to influence a child, one must be careful not to be that child's parent or grandparent.
• A hypocrite is a person who - but who isn't?
• A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists.
• A sequel is an admission that you've been reduced to imitating yourself.
• A demagogue is a person with whom we disagree as to which gang should mismanage the country.
• Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.
• Bores bore each other too; but it never seems to teach them anything.
• By the time a bartender knows what drink a man will have before he orders, there is little else about him worth knowing.
• Did you ever notice that when a politician does get an idea he usually gets it all wrong.
• Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun.
• In all systems of theology the devil figures as a male person. Yes, it is women who keep the church going.
• An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.
• 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.
• Every cloud has its silver lining but it is sometimes a little difficult to get it to the mint.
• I would rather start a family than finish one.
• 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.
• Honesty is a good thing, but it is not profitable to its possessor unless it is kept under control.
• Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.
• Fishing is a delusion entirely surrounded by liars in old clothes.
• 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.