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.