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
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
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: Regret, Repentance, Remorse, Blessings
When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him whose?
—Don Marquis
Topics: Hard Work, Funny quotes, Wealth, Work
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
Honesty is a good thing, but it is not profitable to its possessor unless it is kept under control.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Honesty
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: Ancestors, Inheritance
Fishing is a delusion entirely surrounded by liars in old clothes.
—Don Marquis
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
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
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
In order to influence a child, one must be careful not to be that child’s parent or grandparent.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Parents, Parenting
Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.
—Don Marquis
Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Procrastination, Time
Friends, I beg you do not shirk your daily task of indolence.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Relaxation
Man cannot be uplifted; he must be seduced into virtue.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Virtue
Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Poetry
Bores bore each other too; but it never seems to teach them anything.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Bores, Boredom
Did you ever notice that when a politician does get an idea he usually gets it all wrong.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Politics, Politicians
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
Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Instincts, Reason
A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Pessimism
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
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
Some persons are likable in spite of their unswerving integrity.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Honesty
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
I never think at all when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing
Science has always been too dignified to invent a good backscratcher.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Science
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
Happiness comes fleetingly now and then to those who have learned to do without it and to them only.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Happiness
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Sam Levenson American Humorist
- 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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