Don Marquis
An optimist is a guy that has never had much experience.Collection: Experience
Punctuality is one of the cardinal business virtues: always insist on it in your subordinates.Collection: Business
Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun.Collection: Business
An idea isn't responsible for the people who believe in it.Collection: Funny
A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists.Collection: Funny
When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?'Collection: Work
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.Collection: Happiness
There is nothing so habit-forming as money.Collection: Money
Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.Collection: Nature
In all systems of theology the devil figures as a male person. Yes, it is women who keep the church going.Collection: Women
Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.Collection: Funny
Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.Collection: Happiness
I would rather start a family than finish one.Collection: Family
Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.Collection: Poetry
Every cloud has its silver lining but it is sometimes a little difficult to get it to the mint.Collection: Funny
Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.Collection: Poetry
Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever.Collection: Age
Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough.Collection: Age
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.Collection: Family
Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.Collection: Poetry
Ours 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.
Fishing is a delusion entirely surrounded by liars in old clothes.
We pay for the mistakes of our ancestors, and it seems only fair that they should leave us the money to pay with.
Did you ever notice that when a politician does get an idea he usually gets it all wrong.
Prohibition makes you want to cry into your beer and denies you the beer to cry into.
A hypocrite is a person who - but who isn't?
The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race.
Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.
Successful people are the ones who think up things for the rest of the world to keep busy at.
Honesty is a good thing, but it is not profitable to its possessor unless it is kept under control.
Man cannot be uplifted; he must be seduced into virtue.
By the time a bartender knows what drink a man will have before he orders, there is little else about him worth knowing.
A demagogue is a person with whom we disagree as to which gang should mismanage the country.
The trouble with the public is that there is too much of it; what we need in public is less quantity and more quality.
One of the most important things to remember about infant care is: don't change diapers in midstream.
There is luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel no one else has a right to blame us.
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.
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.
Some persons are likeable in spite of their unswerving integrity.
In order to influence a child, one must be careful not to be that child's parent or grandparent.
It takes all sorts of people to make the underworld.
The art of newspaper paragraphing is to stroke a platitude until it purrs like an epigram.
A sequel is an admission that you've been reduced to imitating yourself.
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Civilization
I suppose the human race is doing the best it can but hells bells thats only an explanation its not an excuse.Collection: Race
An optimist is the person who has never had any experience at all.Collection: Optimism
Nearly every night before I go to bed I ask myself, "Have I vibrated in tune with the Infinite today, or have I failed?Collection: Night
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.Collection: Running