Horace

Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.

Let your character be kept up the very end, just as it began, and so be consistent.

Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant.

Why do you hasten to remove anything which hurts your eye, while if something affects your soul you postpone the cure until next year?

I strive to be brief, and I become obscure.

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

It is, indeed, at home that every man must be known by those who would make a just estimate either of his virtue or felicity; for smiles and embroidery are alike occasional, and the mind is often dressed for show in painted honor, and fictitious benevolence.

It’s like something shifted when I spoke to you, I can’t even put words to it. This sense of gentle peace, space, lightness, freedom. The realization that the longing I carried for so long, that pain was not about him all along. It was the yearning to return to that place from which, once upon a time, we all came.

The triumphs of peace have been in some proximity to war. Whilst the hand was still familiar with the sword-hilt, whilst the habits of the camp were still visible in the port and complexion of the gentleman, his intellectual power culminated; the compression and tension of these stern conditions is a training for the finest and softest arts, and can rarely be compensated in tranquil times, except by some analogous vigor drawn from occupations as hardy as war.

It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.

Higher than the question of our duration is the question of our deserving. Immortality will come to such as are fit for it, and he would be a great soul in future must be a great soul now.

Labor diligently to increase your property.

A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one’s heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.

Don’t order any black things. Rejoice in his memory; and be radiant: leave grief to the children. Wear violet and purple. Be patient with the poor people who will snivel: they don’t know; and they think they will live for ever, which makes death a division instead of a bond.

I think probably kindness is my number one attribute in a human being. I’ll put it before any of the things like courage or bravery or generosity or anything else.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

One farmer says to me, ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;’ and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.

Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.

If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content.

Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling and spending their lives like servants.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.