Horace

Fortune makes a fool of those she favors too much.

No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water.

Nothing’s beautiful from every point of view.

The envious man grows lean at the success of his neighbor.

Your own safety is at stake when your neighbor’s wall is ablaze.

A good and faithful judge ever prefers the honorable to the expedient.

Gentle Jesus, meek and mild’ is a snivelling modern invention, with no warrant in the gospels.

Courtesy Life be not so short but that there is always time for courtesy.

Today is a king in disguise.

My evening visitors, if they cannot see the clock should find the time in my face.

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.

God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.

One lesson we learn early, that in spite of seeming difference, men are all of one pattern. We readily assume this with our mates, and are disappointed and angry if we find that we are premature, and that their watches are slower than ours. In fact, the only sin which we never forgive in each other is difference of opinion.

Work is always an antidote to depression.

There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — `Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

Beauty surrounds us, but usually we need to be walking in a garden to know it.

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

We rarely find anyone who can say he has lived a happy life, and who, content with his life, can retire from the world like a satisfied guest.