Don Marquis Quotes

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

John C. Maxwell

#2. Don Marquis came down after a month on the wagon, ambled over to the bar, and announced, 'I've conquered that goddamn willpower of mine. Gimme a double Scotch.

E.B. White

#3. 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

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

Don Marquis

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

Don Marquis

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

Don Marquis

#7. Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.

Don Marquis

#8. 'Door,' called Richard. 'Don't do it. Don't set it free. We don't matter.'
'Actually,' said the marquis, 'I matter very much. But I have to agree. Don't do it.'

Neil Gaiman

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. With regard to ghosts, while we have never believed in them, we have always been afraid of them.

Don Marquis

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. You look beautiful sitting there spitting at me like a she-cat. All I have to do is look at you, and I lust. I'm going to take you back to the hotel and take off that delectable dress and make love to you until you don't have the energy to be mad at me anymore. Ian Connelly, Marquis of Derne

Karen Robards

#17. 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

#18. A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists.

Don Marquis

#19. Just as soon as the uplifters get a country reformed it slips into a nose dive.

Don Marquis

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

Don Marquis

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

Don Marquis

#22. Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.

Don Marquis

#23. Every cloud has its silver lining but it is sometimes a little difficult to get it to the mint'
-archy the cockroach

Don Marquis

#24. I love you as New Englanders love pie!

Don Marquis

#25. 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

#26. An optimist is a man who has never had much experience.

Don Marquis

#27. 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

#28. Don't have children: they deform women's bodies and turn into an enemy 20 years later.

Marquis De Sade

#29. An idea isn't responsible for the people who believe it.

Don Marquis

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

Don Marquis

#31. There is nothing so habit-forming as money.

Don Marquis

#32. As the skull of the man grows broader, so do his creeds. And his gods they are shaped in his image and mirror his needs. And he clothes them with thunders and beauty, He clothes them with music and fire, Seeing not, as he bows by their altars, That he worships his own desire.

Don Marquis

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

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

Don Marquis

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

Don Marquis

#38. 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

#39. A certain alloy of expediency improves the gold of morality and makes it wear all the longer.

Don Marquis

#40. 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

#41. A demagogue is a person with whom we disagree as to which gang should mismanage the country.

Don Marquis

#42. 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

#43. Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

Don Marquis

#44. No form of government matters nearly as much as the spirit and intelligence brought to the administration of any form of government.

Don Marquis

#45. 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

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

Don Marquis

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

Don Marquis

#48. 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

#49. I would rather start a family than finish one.

Don Marquis

#50. I don't know what the heart is, not I: I only use the word to denote the mind's frailties.

Marquis De Sade

#51. 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

#52. 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

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

Don Marquis

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

Don Marquis

#55. It takes all sorts of people to make the underworld.

Don Marquis

#56. Life's too damn funny for me to explain.

Don Marquis

#57. 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

#58. Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday

Don Marquis

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

Don Marquis

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. Many a man spanks his children for things his own father should have spanked out of him.

Don Marquis

#65. I don't want the universe broken up just yet," drawled the Marquis. "I want to do a lot of beastly things before I die. I thought of one yesterday in bed.

G.K. Chesterton

#66. 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

#67. I am never so happy aswhen I am broke, and lately I have been happy all the time. - Mehitabel the Cat

Don Marquis

#68. 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

#69. Not every woman in old slippers can manage to look like Cinderella

Don Marquis

#70. An old stomach reforms more whiskey drinkers than a new resolve.

Don Marquis

#71. When you can't have anything else, you can have virtue.

Don Marquis

#72. it s cheerio
my deario
that pulls a
lady through
exclamation point

Don Marquis

#73. Old godheads sink in space and drown Their arks like foundered galleons sucked down.

Don Marquis

#74. Publishing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

Don Marquis

#75. Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Don Marquis

#76. Censors are necessary, increasingly necessary, if America is to avoid having a vital literature.

Don Marquis

#77. There is always a comforting thought in time of trouble when it is not our trouble.

Don Marquis

#78. Vibrations are the key to everything. Atoms used to be, but atoms have quite gone out.

Don Marquis

#79. 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

#80. There's a dance in the old dame yet.

Don Marquis

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. Some persons are likeable in spite of their unswerving integrity.

Don Marquis

#84. Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun.

Don Marquis

#85. I look back on my life
and it seems to me to be
just one damned kitten
after another

Don Marquis

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

Don Marquis

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

Don Marquis

#88. The high cost of living isnt so bad if you dont have to pay for it

Don Marquis

#89. 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

#90. Fishing: a delusion entirely surrounded by liars in old clothes.

Don Marquis

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

Don Marquis

#92. 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

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

Don Marquis

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

Don Marquis

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

Don Marquis

#96. My heart hath followed all my days Something I cannot name.

Don Marquis

#97. 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

#98. A little while with grief and laughter, And then the day will close; The shadows gather ... what comes after No man knows.

Don Marquis

#99. 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

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

Don Marquis