Horace

The poets aim is either to profit or to please, or to blend in one the delightful and the useful. Whatever the lesson you would convey, be brief, that your hearers may catch quickly what is said and faithfully retain it. Every superfluous word is spilled from the too-full memory.

We are free to yield to truth.

Who then is free? The wise man who can command himself.

I teach that all men are mad.

Undeservedly you will atone for the sins of your fathers.

Anger is a momentary madness, so control your passion or it will control you.

In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him, and in that I am his pupil.

Men know that women are an over-match for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves.

Put on the lights there, now. Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you’re not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos…

Shame arises from the fear of men, conscience from the fear of God.

Pain is less subject than pleasure to careless expression.

Quotation is the highest compliment you can pay to an author.

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

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

We learned about dignity and decency – that how hard you work matters more than how much you make… that helping others means more than just getting ahead yourself.

I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply.

Thought is the sculptor who can create the person you want to be.

The walking of Man is falling forwards.

The Humble, Meek, Merciful, Just, Pious and Devout Souls, are everywhere of one religion; and when Death has taken off the Mask, they will know one another, though the divers Liveries they wear here make them Strangers.

We cannot well do without our sins; they are the highway of our virtue.

Out of love and hatred, out of earnings and borrowings and leadings and losses; out of sickness and pain; out of wooing and worshipping; out of traveling and voting and watching and caring; out of disgrace and contempt, comes our tuition in the serene and beautiful laws.