Horace

Why do you hasten to remove anything which hurts your eye, while if something affects your soul you postpone the cure until next year?

Tear thyself from delay.

If a better system is thine, impart it; if not, make use of mine.

We rarely find anyone who can say he has lived a happy life, and who, content with his life, can retire from the world like a satisfied guest.

Fierce eagles do not produce timorous doves.

He that has given today may, if he so please, take away tomorrow.

I desire to gain your Love and Friendship by a kind, Just and Peaceful Life.

Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities.

Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right.

The ancients recommended us to sacrifice to the Graces, but Milton sacrificed to the Devil.

See only that thou work and thou canst not escape the reward.

Sorrow makes us children again.

The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man, you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind, I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that.

We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character.

He who is only a traveler learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.

The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people but if we tried to shut up the insane we would run out of building materials.

Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.

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.

Man is God’s highest present development. He is the latest thing in God.

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me.