Horace

In the word of no master am I bound to believe.

The poets aim is either to profit or to please, or to blend in one the delightful and the useful. Whatever the lesson you would convey, be brief, that your hearers may catch quickly what is said and faithfully retain it. Every superfluous word is spilled from the too-full memory.

Undeservedly you will atone for the sins of your fathers.

Strange – is it not? That of the myriads who Before us passed the door of Darkness through, Not one returns to tell us of the road Which to discover we must travel too.

One wanders to the left, another to the right. Both are equally in error, but, are seduced by different delusions.

O imitators, you slavish herd!

Let no man pull you low enough to hate him.

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.

Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.

There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

Do what good thou canst unknown, and be not vain of what ought rather to be felt than seen.

If in doubt, don’t. If still in doubt, do what’s right.

He hates chess. He says it is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something clever when they are only wasting their time.

The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.

There are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it.

The eye is the jewel of the body.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.