Don Marquis

The wise and subtle deities permit nothing worthy to be lost.

Men could not think of THE ALMOST PERFECT STATE if they did not have it in them ultimately to create THE ALMOST PERFECT STATE.

Do the best you can, without straining yourself too much and too continuously, and leave the rest to God.

The best good that you can possibly achieve is not good enough if you have to strain yourself all the time to reach it.

We shall know that the Almost Perfect State is here when the kind of old age each person wants is possible to him. Of course, all of you may not want the kind we want . . . some of you may prefer prunes and morality to the bitter end.

We have always been compelled, and we shall be compelled for many years to come, to be prudent, cautious, staid, sober, conservative, industrious, respectful of established institutions, a model citizen.

we don’t wish to make any one envious of the good time that is coming to us … We look forward to a disreputable, vigorous, unhonoured, and disorderly old age.

we shall shoot out the lights when we want to go to sleep, instead of turning them off

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.

Personally we look forward to an old age of dissipation and indolence and unreverend disrepute. In fifty years we shall be ninety-two years old. We intend to work rather hard during those fifty years and accumulate enough to live on …

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.

Growing and learning and obeying the rules of their elders, or fighting against them, are not easy things to do.

Infancy is not what it is cracked up to be.

we are after a system that scarcely knows it is a system; the great thing is to have the largest number of individuals as happy as may be, for a little while at least, some time before they die.

No matter how nearly perfect an Almost Perfect State may be, it is not nearly enough perfect unless the individuals who compose it can, somewhere between death and birth, have a perfectly corking time for a few years.

If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you.