Horace

When you introduce a moral lesson, let it be brief.

They change their climate, not their soul, who rush across the sea.

What fugitive from his country can also escape from himself.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years.

There is nothing assured to mortals.

I am not bound over to swear allegiance to any master; where the storm drives me I turn in for shelter.

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage. As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west.

The mould of a man’s fortune is in his own hands.

Men are what their mothers made them.

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

The serpent if it wants to become the dragon must eat itself.

It is necessary to hope… for hope itself is happiness.

Do not undervalue the headache. While it is at its sharpest it seems a bad investment; but when relief begins, the unexpired remainder is worth $4 a minute.

My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return.

Poets, like friends to whom you are in debt, you hate.

The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.

When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs. I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat.

Necessity does everything well.

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’

We love to overlook the boundaries which we do not wish to pass.

I am not able to instruct you. I can only tell that I have chosen wrong. I have passed my time in study without experience; in the attainment of sciences which can, for the most part, be but remotely useful to mankind. I have purchased knowledge at the expense of all the common comforts of life: I have missed the endearing elegance of female friendship, and the happy commerce of domestic tenderness.