Don Marquis

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.

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

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

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.

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

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!

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

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

Friends I beg you do not shirk your daily task of indolence.

Ideas pull the trigger but instinct loads the gun.

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.

Happiness comes fleetingly now and then to those who have learned to do without it and to them only.

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.

Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.

Happiness comes fleetingly now and then To those who have learned to do without it And to them only.

The goal of all civilization all religious thought and all that sort of thing is simply to have a good time. But man gets so solemn over the process that he forgets the end.

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

There is nothing we like to see so much as the gleam of pleasure in a person's eye when he feels that we have sympathized with him understood him interested ourself in his welfare. At these moments something fine and spiritual passes between two friends. These moments are the moments worth living.