Horace

I strive to be brief, and I become obscure.

He tosses aside his paint-pots and his words a foot and a half long.

The one who cannot restrain their anger will wish undone, what their temper and irritation prompted them to do.

Let your character be kept up the very end, just as it began, and so be consistent.

A good scare is worth more than good advice.

It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth into a liar – that I call an achievement.

Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and prosperity and you need not give alms.

You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

Genius always finds itself a century too early.

Common sense is the best distributed thing in the world, for we all think we possess a good share of it.

Sympathy is a supporting atmosphere, and in it we unfold easily and well.

Resting at your shore fills me with a peace, as if I’ve always been here. My cells resonating with the element of you, boundaries diffuse as one.

Which is worse? The wolf who cries before eating the lamb or the wolf who does not.

No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the presence of ladies.

Better a broken promise than none at all.

All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking if God had not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity.

Human life is as evanescent as the morning dew or a flash of lightning.

Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

It is possible to have a strong self-love without any self-satisfaction, rather with a self-discontent which is the more intense because one’s own little core of egoistic sensibility is a supreme care.