Don Marquis Quotes & Sayings

My master is the same as god
when he thumps with his hand
people bring us hamburg steaks
at any eating stand pete s holiday — Don Marquis

An optimist is a guy that has never had much experience. — Don Marquis

With regard to ghosts, while we have never believed in them, we have always been afraid of them. — Don Marquis

In all systems of theology the devil figures as a male person. Yes, it is women who keep the church going. — Don Marquis

It is better to be a part of beauty for one instant and then cease to exist than to exist forever and never be a part of beauty — Don Marquis

There was once a Hindu sage, who sat down on the banks of the Ganges and thought for seventy years about the millennium. Just as he arrived at the solution and was putting it into verse, a mosquito stung him and he forgot it again at once. — Don Marquis

It has been my observation and experience, and that of my family, that nothing human works out well. — Don Marquis

A certain alloy of expediency improves the gold of morality and makes it wear all the longer. — Don Marquis

It would be a colorless world if each individual did not secretly believe himself superior to almost everyone else. — Don Marquis

There's a dance in the old dame yet. — Don Marquis

Every cloud has its silver lining but it is sometimes a little difficult to get it to the mint'
-archy the cockroach — Don Marquis

An optimist is a man who has never had much experience. — Don Marquis

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

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

Prohibition makes you want to cry into your beer and denies you the beer to cry into — Don Marquis

Give up the dream that Love may trick the fates To live again somewhere beyond the gleam Of dying stars, or shatter the strong gates Some god has builded high; give up the dream. — Don Marquis

I would rather start a family than finish one. — Don Marquis

When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose? — Don Marquis

I suppose the human race is doing the best it can but hells bells thats only an explanation its not an excuse. — 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

The best good that you can possibly achieve is not good enough if you have to strain yourself all the time to reach it. A thing is only worth doing, and doing again and again, if you can do it rather easily, and get some joy out of it. — Don Marquis

A great many people who spend their time mourning over the brevity of life could make it seem longer if they did a little more work. — Don Marquis

The things that I can't have I want, And what I have seems second-rate, The things I want to do I can't, And what I have to do I hate. — Don Marquis

By the time a bartender knows what drink a man will have before he orders, there is little else about him worth knowing. — Don Marquis

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

Life is one damned kitten after another. Mehitabel the Alley Cat — 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

Nearly every night before I go to bed I ask myself, Have I vibrated in tune with the Infinite today, or have I failed? — Don Marquis

Yes, he's got all them different kinds of thoroughbred blood in him, and he's got other kinds you ain't mentioned and that you ain't slick enough to see. — Don Marquis

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

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

Vibrations are the key to everything. Atoms used to be, but atoms have quite gone out. — Don Marquis

When you can't have anything else, you can have virtue. — Don Marquis

For all of the creeds are false, and all of the creeds are true; And low at the shrines where my brothers bow, there will I bow too; For no form of a god, and no fashion Man has made in his desperate passion, But is worthy some worship of mine; Not too hot with a gross belief, Nor yet too cold with pride, I will bow me down where my brothers bow, Humble, but open eyed. — Don Marquis

Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday — Don Marquis

An old stomach reforms more whiskey drinkers than a new resolve. — Don Marquis

Our is a world where people don't know what they want and are willing to go through hell to get it. — Don Marquis

For him who fain would teach the world The world holds hate in fee- For Socrates, the hemlock cup; For Christ, Gethsemane. — Don Marquis

They thought they were heroes when they were only cinders in the eye of humanity too many creatures both insects and humans estimate their own value by the amount of irritation they are able to cause greater personalities than themselves — Don Marquis

Some persons are likeable in spite of their unswerving integrity. — Don Marquis

A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists. — Don Marquis

It is a cheering thought to think that God is on the side of the best digestion. — 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

You want to know
whether i believe in ghosts
of course i do not believe in them
if you had known
as many of them as i have
you would not
believe in them either — Don Marquis

The wand waved; the Adam's Apple leapt, and they were off. What followed cannot be indicated typographically. But if a cat were a sawmill, and a dog were a gigantic cart full of tin cans bouncing through a stone paved street, and that dog and that cat hated each other and were telling each other so, it would sound much like it. — Don Marquis

Insects have their own point of view about civilization 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

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!-Taking the Longer View — Don Marquis

The art of newspaper paragraphing is to stroke a platitude until it purrs like an epigram. — Don Marquis

I am never so happy aswhen I am broke, and lately I have been happy all the time. - Mehitabel the Cat — Don Marquis

Every honorable man is forced to yield to blackmail once or twice in his life, just for the sake of keeping peace in the community. — Don Marquis

It wont be long now it wont be long man is making deserts of the earth it wont be long now before man will have used it up so that nothing but ants and centipedes and scorpions can find a living on it. — Don Marquis

It s too great a
blow underlined
to a man apostrophe s
pride
to see a woman
influence other women
more than he can
himself — Don Marquis

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

I have been
used something fierce in my time but
i am no bum sport archy
i am a free spirit archy i
look on myself as being
quite a romantic character oh the
queens i have been and the
swell feeds i have ate
a cockroach which you are
and a poet which you used to be
archy couldn t understand
my feelings at having come
down to this i have
had bids to elegant feeds where poets
and cockroaches would
neither one be mentioned without a
laugh archy i have had
adventures but i
have never been an adventuress — Don Marquis

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

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

Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. — Don Marquis

Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun. — Don Marquis

A demagogue is a person with whom we disagree as to which gang should mismanage the country. — Don Marquis

Many a man spanks his children for things his own father should have spanked out of him. — Don Marquis

Successful people are the ones who think up things for the rest of the world to keep busy at. — Don Marquis

An idea isn't responsible for the people who believe it. — Don Marquis

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

The high cost of living isnt so bad if you dont have to pay for it — 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. — Don Marquis

The most pleasant and useful persons are those who leave some of the problems of the universe for God to worry about. — Don Marquis

From 'the lesson of the moth': and before i could argue him out of his philosophy he went and immolated himself on a patent cigar lighter i do not agree with him myself i would rather have half the happiness and twice the longevity but at the same time i wish there was something i wanted as badly as he wanted to fry himself — Don Marquis

No form of government matters nearly as much as the spirit and intelligence brought to the administration of any form of government. — Don Marquis

Publishing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. — Don Marquis

Fishing: a delusion entirely surrounded by liars in old clothes. — Don Marquis

Old godheads sink in space and drown Their arks like foundered galleons sucked down. — Don Marquis

If the world were not so full of people, and most of them did not have to work so hard, there would be more time for them to get out and lie on the grass, and there would be more grass for them to lie on. — Don Marquis

My youth i shall never forget
but there s nothing i really regret
wotthehell wotthehell
there s a dance in the old dame yet
toujours gai toujours gai — Don Marquis

A hypocrite is a person who - but who isn't? — Don Marquis

I once heard the survivors of a colony of ants that had been partially obliterated by a cow's foot seriously debating the intention of the gods towards their civilization. — Don Marquis

Censors are necessary, increasingly necessary, if America is to avoid having a vital literature. — Don Marquis

There is bound to be a certain amount of trouble running any country. If you are president, the trouble happens to you. But if you are a tyrant you can arrange things so that most of the trouble happens to other people. — Don Marquis

I love you as New Englanders love pie! — Don Marquis

The trouble with the public is that there is too much of it; what we need in public is less quantity and more quality. — Don Marquis

Most of the people living in New York have come here from the far to try to make enough money to go back to the farm — Don Marquis

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

I look back on my life
and it seems to me to be
just one damned kitten
after another — Don Marquis

The female of all species are most dangerous when they appear to retreat. — Don Marquis

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

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. — Don Marquis

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

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind. — Don Marquis

Not every woman in old slippers can manage to look like Cinderella — Don Marquis

A sequel is an admission that you've been reduced to imitating yourself. — Don Marquis

Fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
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

Just as soon as the uplifters get a country reformed it slips into a nose dive. — Don Marquis

Personally my ambition is to get my time as a cockroach shortened for good
behavior and be promoted to a revenue officer
it is not much of a step up but i am humble — Don Marquis

it s cheerio
my deario
that pulls a
lady through
exclamation point — Don Marquis

What man calls civilizationalways results in desertsman is never on the squarehe uses up the fat and greenery of the eartheach generation wastes a little moreof the future with greed and lust for riches — Don Marquis

One of the most important things to remember about infant care is: don't change diapers in midstream. — Don Marquis

That stern and rockbound coast felt like an amateur when it saw how grim the puritans that landed on it were. — Don Marquis

Justice ... is not inherent in the universe and what man has put there he uses when he uses it at all strictly for his own purposes the world is so sad that the only way to live with it is to laugh at it — Don Marquis

i do not see why men
should be so proud
insects have the more
ancient lineage
according to the scientists
insects were insects
when man was only
a burbling whatsit — Don Marquis

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