Horace

Sweet and glorious it is to die for our country.

We are free to yield to truth.

Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it.

Live as brave men and face adversity with stout hearts.

Those that are little, little things suit.

There is nothing assured to mortals.

Men are respectable only as they respect.

I never worry about action, but only inaction.

Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze.

Faith keeps many doubts in her pay. If I could not doubt, I should not believe.

The wretched have no compassion, they can do good only from strong principles of duty.

We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

What do sad complaints avail if the offense is not cut down by punishment.

The State must follow, and not lead, the character and progress of the citizen.

I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.

Sorrow makes us all children again, destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest knows nothing.

A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself.

The superfluous, a very necessary thing.

There is properly no history; only biography.

There mark what ills the scholar’s life assail, toil, envy, want, and patron.