Don Marquis, fully Donald Robert Perry Marquis

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.

Nearly every night before I go to bed I ask myself, Have I vibrated in tune with the Infinite today, or have I failed?

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

The trouble with the public is that there is too much of it; what we need in public is less quantity and more quality.

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

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

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

The wand waved; the Adam's Apple leapt, and they were off. What followed cannot be indicated typographically. But if a cat were a sawmill, and a dog were a gigantic cart full of tin cans bouncing through a stone paved street, and that dog and that cat hated each other and were telling each other so, it would sound much like it.

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

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 .