Horace

Usually the modest person passes for someone reserved, the silent for a sullen person

You must avoid sloth, that wicked siren.

Sweet and glorious it is to die for our country.

Why harass with eternal purposes a mind to weak to grasp them?

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone.

The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out.

As peace is the end of war, so to be idle is the ultimate purpose of the busy.

There is as much difference between the counsel that a friend giveth, and that a man giveth himself, as there is between the counsel of a friend and of a flatterer. For there is no such flatterer as is a man’s self.

Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions.

You cannot be a hero without being a coward.

Birth and death are so closely related that one could not destroy either without destroying the other at the same time. It is extinction that makes creation possible.

Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.

No orator can top the one who can give good nicknames.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning, not to be measured by the horse-power of the understanding.

The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.

In nature nothing can be given. All things are sold.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

Whenever you wish to do anything against the law, Cicely, always consult a good solicitor first.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.