Don Marquis Quotes

Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday

Life's too damn funny for me to explain.

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

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.

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

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

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

It takes all sorts of people to make the underworld.

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

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

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.

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.

I have had my ups and downs but wotthehell wotthehell yesterday sceptres and crowns fried oysters and velvet gowns and today i herd with bums but wotthehell wotthehell i wake the world from sleep as i caper and sing and leap when i sing my wild free tune wotthehell wotthehell under the blear eyed moon i am pelted with cast off shoon but wotthehell wotthehell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

There's a dance in the old dame yet.

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

I get up in the morning with an idea for a three-volume novel and by nightfall it's a paragraph in my column.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

a spider and a fly

i heard a spider
and a fly arguing
wait said the fly
do not eat me
i serve a great purpose
in the world

you will have to
show me said the spider

i scurry around
gutters and sewers
and garbage cans
said the fly and gather
up the germs of
typhoid influenza
and pneumonia on my feet
and wings
then i carry these germs
into households of men
and give them diseases
all the people who
have lived the right
sort of life recover
from the diseases
and the old soaks who
have weakened their systems
with liquor and iniquity
succumb it is my mission
to help rid the world
of these wicked persons
i am a vessel of righteousness
scattering seeds of justice
and serving the noblest uses

it is true said the spider
that you are more
useful in a plodding
material sort of way
than i am but i do not
serve the utilitarian deities
i serve the gods of beauty
look at the gossamer webs
i weave they float in the sun
like filaments of song
if you get what i mean
i do not work at anything
i play all the time
i am busy with the stuff
of enchantment and the materials
of fairyland my works
transcend utility
i am the artist
a creator and demi god
it is ridiculous to suppose
that i should be denied
the food

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A fierce unrest seethes at the core, of all existing things:, it was the eager wish to soar, that gave the gods their wings.

Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever.

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

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

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

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

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

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!

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

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.

Some persons are likeable in spite of their unswerving integrity.

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.

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.

Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun.

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.

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

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

Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.

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.

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

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

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

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