Don Marquis
» Age and Aging » “Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever.”
» Blood » “Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.”
» Bores and Boredom » “Bores bore each other too; but it never seems to teach them anything.”
» Difficulties » “Every cloud has its silver lining but it is sometimes a little difficult to get it to the mint”
» Dissatisfaction » “A fierce unrest seethes at the core, of all existing things:, it was the eager wish to soar, that gave the gods their wings.”
» Family » “I would rather start a family than finish one.”
» Fishing » “Fishing is a delusion entirely surrounded by liars in old clothes.”
» Happiness » “Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.”
» Hard Work » “When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him whose?”
» Honesty » “Some persons are likable in spite of their unswerving integrity.”
» Honesty » “Honesty is a good thing, but it is not profitable to its possessor unless it is kept under control.”
» Ideas » “An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.”
» Ideas » “An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”
» Inheritance » “We pay for the mistakes of our ancestors, and it seems only fair that they should leave us the money to pay with.”
» Insects » “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”
» Journalism and Journalists » “I get up in the morning with an idea for a three-volume novel and by nightfall it’s a paragraph in my column.”
» Misfortunes » “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.”
» Money » “There is nothing so habit-forming as money.”
» Optimism » “An optimist is a man who has never had much experience.”
» Parents and Parenting » “In order to influence a child, one must be careful not to be that child’s parent or grandparent.”
» Pessimism » “A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists.”
» Poetry and Poets » “Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.”
» Poetry and Poets » “Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.”
» Procrastination » “Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.”
» Prohibition » “prohibition makes you want to cry into your beer and denies you the beer to cry into”
» Punctuality » “Punctuality is one of the cardinal business virtues: always insist on it in your subordinates.”
» Science and Scientists » “Science has always been too dignified to invent a good backscratcher.”
» Success » “Successful people are the ones who think up things for the rest of the world to keep busy at.”
» Success » “Ours is a world where people don’t know what they want and are willing to go through hell to get it.”
» Thoughts and Thinking » “If you make people think they’re thinking they’ll love you: but if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.”
» Virtue » “When you can’t have anything else, you can have virtue.”
» Work » “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.”
» Writers and Writing » “I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.”
