Man cannot be uplifted; he must be seduced into virtue.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Virtue
This is another day! Are its eyes blurred With maudlin grief for any wasted past? A thousand thousand failures shall not daunt! Let dust clasp dust, death, death; I am alive.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Repentance, Remorse, Blessings, Regret
Adolescence is certainly far from a uniformly pleasant period. Early manhood might be the most glorious time of all were it not that the sheer excess of life and vigor gets a fellow into continual scrapes.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Youth
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: Journalism, Journalists
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
I never think at all when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writers, Writing
If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.
—Don Marquis
Science has always been too dignified to invent a good backscratcher.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Science
A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Pessimism
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
Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Poetry
In order to influence a child, one must be careful not to be that child’s parent or grandparent.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Parents, Parenting
He worked like hell in the country so he could live in the city, where he worked like hell so he could live in the country.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Work
The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Humanity
Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Procrastination, Time
Infancy isn’t what it is cracked up to be. Children, not knowing that they are having an easy time, have a good many hard times. Growing and learning and obeying the rules of their elders, or fighting against them, are not easy things to do.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Children
Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Aging, Age
An idea isn’t responsible for the people who believe it.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Ideas
When you can’t have anything else, you can have virtue.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Virtue
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
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.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Happiness, Fate, Unhappiness
Some persons are likable in spite of their unswerving integrity.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Honesty
Punctuality is one of the cardinal business virtues: always insist on it in your subordinates.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Punctuality
Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Happiness
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: Boredom, Happiness
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
Bores bore each other too; but it never seems to teach them anything.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Boredom, Bores
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
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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Sam Levenson American Humorist, Writer
- Thomas Masson American Journalist
- Robert Quillen American Journalist
- Charles Farrar Browne (Artemus Ward) American Humorist
- Andy Rooney American Writer
- Don Herold American Humorist
- Mark Twain American Humorist
- Leo Rosten American Humorist
- Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw) American Humorist
- Bill Bryson American Humorist
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