Horace

A picture is a poem without words.

One gains universal applause who mingles the useful with the agreeable, at once delighting and instructing the reader.

Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant.

Help a man against his will and you do the same as murder him.

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

Youth is unduly busy with pampering the outer person.

One soweth and another reapeth is a verity that applies to evil as well as good.

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.

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.

I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.

In the scenery of spring, nothing is better, nothing worse; the flowering branches are; some long, some short.

All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man had taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit?

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

Talent for talent’s sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor.

This is the ultimate end of man, to find the One which is in him; which is his truth, which is his soul; the key with which he opens the gate of the spiritual life, the heavenly kingdom.

I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed. Amen. Amen.

If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.