Horace

Begin, be bold and venture to be wise.

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don’t labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

If a better system is thine, impart it; if not, make use of mine.

Time will bring to light whatever is hidden; it will cover up and conceal what is now shining in splendor.

I shall not wholly die, and a great part of me will escape the grave.

Many heroes lived before Agamemnon; but all are unknown and unwept, extinguished in everlasting night, because they have no spirited chronicler.

He that pursues fame with just claims, trusts his happiness to the winds; but he that endeavors after it by false merit, has to fear, not only the violence of the storm, but the leaks of his vessel.

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.

I have never felt that anything really mattered but knowing that you stood for the things in which you believed and had done the very best you could.

You. Not wanting me. Was the beginning of me wanting myself. Thank you.

A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is about the last place in which life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of any kind.

Many a man’s strength is in opposition, and when he faileth, he grows out of use.

Go anywhere in England where there are natural, wholesome, contented, and really nice English people; and what do you always find? That the stables are the real center of the household.

My liver swells with bile difficult to repress.

Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.

Man – a creature made at the end of the week’s work when God was tired.

Difficult do you call it, Sir? I wish it were impossible.

There mark what ills the scholar’s life assail, toil, envy, want, and patron.

It is vain for the coward to flee; death follows close behind; it is only by defying it that the brave escape.

The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant. They looked curiously at the costumes we had brought from the wilds of America. They observed that we talked loudly at table sometimes. They noticed that we looked out for expenses and got what we conveniently could out of a franc, and wondered where in the mischief we came from. In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

Thus, by every device from the stick to the carrot, the emaciated Austrian donkey is made to pull the Nazi barrow up an ever-steepening hill.