Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Don Marquis (American Humorist, Journalist)

Donald Robert Perry Marquis (1878–1937) was an American humorist, journalist, novelist, poet, cartoonist, and playwright. He was most famous for creating the characters “Archy” the cockroach and “Mehitabel” the cat.

Born in Walnut, Illinois, and educated at Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois, Marquis had a varied career as a journalist and wrote serious plays and poems. He became noted as a humorist through his columns, “The Sun Dial” in the New York Sun and “The Lantern” in the New York Tribune.

Marquis became a celebrity as a comic writer with The Old Soak’s History of the World (1924.) The Old Soak was also adapted into a hit Broadway play (1922–23,) a silent movie (1926,) and a talkie (1937.)

Marquis’s archy and mehitabel (1927) and archys life of mehitabel (1933) follow the fortunes of Archy the cockroach and Mehitabel, an alley cat. Archy was a former poet who cannot reach the typewriter’s shift key so everything he wrote was in lower case. Mehitabel’s morals are questionable, and she claims that she was Cleopatra a former life.

Among Marquis also published collections of humorous poetry, satirical prose, and plays. His other notable works are Danny’s Own Story (1912,) Dreams and Dust (1915,) The Dark Hours (1924,) and Out of the Sea (1927.)

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Don Marquis

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

The law can make you quit drinking; but it can’t make you quit being the kind that needs a law to make you quit drinking.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Law

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
Topics: Regret, Repentance, Remorse, Blessings

When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him whose?
—Don Marquis
Topics: Hard Work, Funny quotes, Wealth, Work

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

Honesty is a good thing, but it is not profitable to its possessor unless it is kept under control.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Honesty

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
Topics: Ancestors, Inheritance

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

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.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Age

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

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.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Happiness, Fate, Unhappiness

In order to influence a child, one must be careful not to be that child’s parent or grandparent.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Parents, Parenting

Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.
—Don Marquis

Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Procrastination, Time

Friends, I beg you do not shirk your daily task of indolence.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Relaxation

Man cannot be uplifted; he must be seduced into virtue.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Virtue

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Poetry

Bores bore each other too; but it never seems to teach them anything.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Bores, Boredom

Did you ever notice that when a politician does get an idea he usually gets it all wrong.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Politics, Politicians

Ours is a world where people don’t know what they want and are willing to go through hell to get it.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Success & Failure

Ideas pull the trigger, but instinct loads the gun.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Instincts, Reason

A pessimist is a person who has had to listen to too many optimists.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Pessimism

Adolescence is certainly far from a uniformly pleasant period. Early manhood might be the most glorious time of all were it not that the sheer excess of life and vigor gets a fellow into continual scrapes.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Youth

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.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Writing

Some persons are likable in spite of their unswerving integrity.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Honesty

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
Topics: Journalists, Journalism

I never think at all when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing

Science has always been too dignified to invent a good backscratcher.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Science

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.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Aging

Happiness comes fleetingly now and then to those who have learned to do without it and to them only.
—Don Marquis
Topics: Happiness

Wondering Whom to Read Next?

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *