Horace

He will always be a slave who does not know how to live upon a little.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Leave the rest to the gods.

Punishment closely follows guilt as its companion.

You who write, choose a subject suited to your abilities and think long and hard on what your powers are equal to and what they are unable to perform.

Refrain from asking what going to happen tomorrow, and everyday that fortune grants you, count as gain.

Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity.

I sit on a man’s back choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that i am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible….except by getting off his back.

Socialists think profits are a vice; I consider losses the real vice.

Men use thought only as authority for their injustice, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts.

He who would begun has half done. Dare to be wise; begin.

That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the Boiling Spring with his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all the woods on Walden shore, that Trojan horse, with a thousand men in his belly, introduced by mercenary Greeks! Where is the country’s champion, the Moore of Moore Hall, to meet him at the Deep Cut and thrust an avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated pest?

The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure.

Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.

As for doing good; that is one of the professions which is full. Moreover I have tried it fairly and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.

Mix a little foolishness with your serious plans. It is lovely to be silly at the right moment.

Give me insight into today and you may have the antique and future worlds.

Arguments are like fire-arms which a man may keep at home but should not carry about with him.

Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights…sexual intercourse!…His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.

He has been a doctor a year now and has had two patients, no, three, I think – yes, it was three; I attended their funerals.