Horace

I shall strike the stars with my unlifted head.

Sweet and glorious it is to die for our country.

The lofty pine is oftenest shaken by the winds; High towers fall with a heavier crash; And the lightning strikes the highest mountain.

One gains universal applause who mingles the useful with the agreeable, at once delighting and instructing the reader.

Why harass with eternal purposes a mind to weak to grasp them?

Suffering is but another name for the teaching of experience, which is the parent of instruction and the schoolmaster of life.

But you must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know, that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.

I know not any thing more pleasant, or more instructive, than to compare experience with expectation, or to register from time to time the difference between idea and reality. It is by this kind of observation that we grow daily less liable to be disappointed.

Was there ever such an autumn? And yet there was never such a panic and hard times in the commercial world. The merchants and banks are suspending and failing all the country over, but not the sandbanks, solid and warm, and streaked with bloody blackberry vines.You may run upon them as much as you please – even as the crickets do, and find their account in it. They are the stockholders in these banks, and I hear them creaking their content.

You who write, choose a subject suited to your abilities and think long and hard on what your powers are equal to and what they are unable to perform.

How we glow over these novels of passion, when the story is told with any spark of truth and nature! And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before and never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them and take the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a lover.

Courage consists in equality to the problem before us.

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man’s body.

I do not hesitate to read all good books in translations. What is really best in any book is translatable – any real insight or broad human sentiment.

Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.

Sometimes we are inclined to class those who are once-and-a-half witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit.

Judged by every standard which history has applied to Governments, the Soviet Government of Russia is one of the worst tyrannies that has ever existed in the world. It accords no political rights. It rules by terror. It punishes political opinions. It suppresses free speech. It tolerates no newspapers but its own. It persecutes Christianity with a zeal and a cunning never equalled since the times of the Roman Emperors. It is engaged at this moment in trampling down the peoples of Georgia and executing their leaders by hundreds.

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

Your fingers caress my heart strings, shaping a silent sonnet in notes of love. Transcending space and time, bathing the ether in perfect harmony.

Do the wise thing and the kind thing too, and make the best of us and not the worst.

Studies serve for delight, for ornaments, and for ability.