Talk:Don Marquis

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

• A hypocrite is a person who — but who isn't?

• 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

• 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.

• An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.

• Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.

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

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

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

• 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.

• fierce unrest seethes at the core, of all existing things:, it was the eager wish to soar, that gave the gods their wings.

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

• Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.

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

• How often when they find a sage, As sweet as Socrates or Plato; They hand him hemlock for his wage, Or bake him like a sweet potato!

• I get up in the morning with an idea for a three-volume novel and by nightfall it's a paragraph in my column.

• I say that I am myself, but what is this Self of mine But a knot in the tangled skein of things where chance and change combine?

• I would rather start a family than finish one.

• Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun.

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

• 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.

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

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

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

• now and then
  there is a person born
  who is so unlucky
  that he runs into accidents
  which started out to happen
  to somebody else

• 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.

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

• Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

• Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

• prohibition makes you want to cry into your beer and denies you the beer to cry into

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

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

• Science has always been too dignified to invent a good backscratcher.

• 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.

• There is nothing so habit-forming as money.

• 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?"

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

• 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.

• It takes all sorts of people to make the underworld.

• Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.