Quotes By Don Marquis

It takes all sorts of people to make the underworld.

Some persons are likeable in spite of their unswerving integrity.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.

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

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

Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough.

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

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

Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.

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

Prohibition makes you want to cry into your beer and denies you the beer to cry into.

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

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

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

Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun.

We pay for the mistakes of our ancestors, and it seems only fair that they should leave us the money to pay with.

Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.

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

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

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

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race.

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.

There is luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel no one else has a right to blame us.