Horace

What fugitive from his country can also escape from himself.

If you would have me weep, you must first of all feel grief yourself.

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

What we learn only through the ears makes less impression upon our minds than what is presented to the trustworthy eye.

Let us my friends snatch our opportunity from the passing day.

Labor diligently to increase your property.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

A lucky person gets up in the morning, puts both feet on the floor, knows what they’re about to do and thinks it still matters.

The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.

Men on their side must force themselves for a while to lay their notions by and begin to familiarize themselves with facts.

The betrothed and accepted lover has lost the wildest charms of his maiden by her acceptance. She was heaven while he pursued her, but she cannot be heaven if she stoops to one such as he!

Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.

Ideas must work through the brains and the arms of good and brave men, or they are no better than dreams.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

That old law about ‘an eye for an eye’ leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do what is right.

We can’t plan life. All we can do is be available for it.

Skepticism is unbelief in cause and effect.

The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor.

Life is not a spectator sport. If you’re going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you’re wasting your life.