Horace

What do sad complaints avail if the offense is not cut down by punishment.

One night awaits all, and death’s path must be trodden once and for all.

It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure.

If matters go badly now, they will not always be so.

How does it happen, Maecenas, that no one is content with that lot of which he has chosen or which chance has thrown his way, but praises those who follow a different course?

Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it.

Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.

Wealth is in applications of mind to nature; and the art of getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot.

To watch this crystal globe just sent from heaven to associate with me. While these clouds and this somber drizzling weather shut all in, we two draw nearer and know one another. The gathering in of the clouds with the last rush and dying breath of the wind, and then the regular dripping of twigs and leaves the country over, the impression of inward comfort and Sociableness, the drenched stubble and trees that drop beads on you as you pass, their dim outline seen through the rain on all sides drooping in sympathy with yourself. These are my undisputed territory. This is Nature’s English comfort.

Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.

When men come to like a sea-life, they are not fit to live on land.

Repartee is something we think of twenty-four hours too late.

We talk of choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected

For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.

A mother’s yearning feels the presence of the cherished child even in the degraded man.

Life will not bear refinement. You must do as other people do.

No man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it.

We rail at trade, but the historian of the world will see that it was the principle of liberty; that it settled America, and destroyed feudalism, and made peace and keeps peace; that it will abolish slavery.

We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.

No man acquires property without acquiring with it a little arithmetic also.

He who has provoked the shaft of wit, cannot complain that he smarts from it.