Top 80 Don Marquis Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; But if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.”

— Don Marquis

2. “Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun.”

— Don Marquis

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

— Don Marquis

4. “When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: ‘Whose?’”

— Don Marquis

5. “Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.”

— Don Marquis

Featured in: Procrastination Quotes

6. “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

7. “Punctuality is one of the cardinal business virtues: always insist on it in your subordinates.”

— Don Marquis

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

— Don Marquis

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

— Don Marquis

10. “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

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

— Don Marquis

12. “The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race.”

— Don Marquis

13. “Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

— Don Marquis

14. “Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.”

— Don Marquis

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

— Don Marquis

16. “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

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

— Don Marquis

18. “Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.”

— Don Marquis

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

— Don Marquis

20. “Life’s too damn funny for me to explain.”

— Don Marquis

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

— Don Marquis

22. “A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists.”

— Don Marquis

23. “Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.”

— Don Marquis

24. “Many a man spanks his children for things his own father should have spanked out of him.”

— Don Marquis

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

— Don Marquis

26. “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

27. “If a child shows himself 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

28. “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.”

— Don Marquis

29. “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

30. “Not every woman in old slippers can manage to look like Cinderella.”

— Don Marquis

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

— Don Marquis

32. “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

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

— Don Marquis

34. “It takes all sorts of people to make the underworld.”

— Don Marquis

35. “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

36. “The most pleasant and useful persons are those who leave some of the problems of the universe for God to worry about.”

— Don Marquis

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

40. “I love you as New Englanders love pie!”

— Don Marquis

41. “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

42. “What man calls civilization always results in deserts.”

— Don Marquis

43. “There’s a dance in the old dame yet.”

— Don Marquis

44. “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

45. “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

46. “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

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

— Don Marquis

48. “A sequel is an admission that you’ve been reduced to imitating yourself.”

— Don Marquis

49. “If the world were not so full of people, and most of them did not have to work so hard, there would be more time for them to get out and lie on the grass, and there would be more grass for them to lie on.”

— Don Marquis

50. “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