Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Don Marquis (American Humorist, Journalist)

Donald Robert Perry Marquis (1878–1937) was an American humorist, journalist, novelist, poet, cartoonist, and playwright. He was most famous for creating the characters “Archy” the cockroach and “Mehitabel” the cat.

Born in Walnut, Illinois, and educated at Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois, Marquis had a varied career as a journalist and wrote serious plays and poems. He became noted as a humorist through his columns, “The Sun Dial” in the New York Sun and “The Lantern” in the New York Tribune.

Marquis became a celebrity as a comic writer with The Old Soak’s History of the World (1924.) The Old Soak was also adapted into a hit Broadway play (1922–23,) a silent movie (1926,) and a talkie (1937.)

Marquis’s archy and mehitabel (1927) and archys life of mehitabel (1933) follow the fortunes of Archy the cockroach and Mehitabel, an alley cat. Archy was a former poet who cannot reach the typewriter’s shift key so everything he wrote was in lower case. Mehitabel’s morals are questionable, and she claims that she was Cleopatra a former life.

Among Marquis also published collections of humorous poetry, satirical prose, and plays. His other notable works are Danny’s Own Story (1912,) Dreams and Dust (1915,) The Dark Hours (1924,) and Out of the Sea (1927.)

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Don Marquis

Persian pussy from over the sea demure and lazy and smug and fat none of your ribbons and bells for me ours is the zest of the alley cat.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Cats

There is nothing we like to see so much as the gleam of pleasure in a person’s eye when he feels that we have sympathized with him, understood him, interested ourself in his welfare. At these moments something fine and spiritual passes between two friends. These moments are the moments worth living.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Friendship

It is better to be happy for a moment and be burned up with beauty than to live a long time and be bored all the while.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Happiness, Boredom

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.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Writing

I do not think anyone can be taught anything about humor, but I do think that certain persons may be taught the mechanism of producing humorous copy that will sell to magazines and newspapers.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Humor

Happiness comes fleetingly now and then to those who have learned to do without it and to them only.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Happiness

Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Happiness

prohibition makes you want to cry into your beer and denies you the beer to cry into.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Drinking

Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Procrastination, Time

The law can make you quit drinking; but it can’t make you quit being the kind that needs a law to make you quit drinking.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Law

Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.
—Don Marquis

Ours is a world where people don’t know what they want and are willing to go through hell to get it.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Success & Failure

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.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Age

Bores bore each other too; but it never seems to teach them anything.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Boredom, Bores

Man cannot be uplifted; he must be seduced into virtue.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Virtue

When you can’t have anything else, you can have virtue.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Virtue

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.
—Don Marquis

We pay for the mistakes of our ancestors, and it seems only fair that they should leave us the money to pay with.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Inheritance, Ancestors

A fierce unrest seethes at the core, of all existing things:, it was the eager wish to soar, that gave the gods their wings.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Satisfaction

Some persons are likable in spite of their unswerving integrity.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Honesty

The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Humanity

Honesty is a good thing, but it is not profitable to its possessor unless it is kept under control.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Honesty

There is nothing so habit-forming as money.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Money

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.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Aging

I get up in the morning with an idea for a three-volume novel and by nightfall it’s a paragraph in my column.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Journalists, Journalism

Successful people are the ones who think up things for the rest of the world to keep busy at.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Success & Failure, Success

When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him whose?
—Don Marquis
Topics: Funny quotes, Wealth, Work, Hard Work

An idea isn’t responsible for the people who believe it.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Ideas

The goal of all civilization, all religious thought, and all that sort of thing is simply to have a good time. But man gets so solemn over the process that he forgets the end.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Goals, Aspirations

An optimist is a man who has never had much experience.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Optimism, Experience

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