Horace

You must often make erasures if you mean to write what is worthy of being read a second time; and don’t labor for the admiration of the crowd, but be content with a few choice readers.

He who is upright in his way of life and free from sin.

It is of no consequence of what parents a man is born, as long as he be a man of merit.

Life gives nothing to man without labor.

The years as they pass plunder us of one thing after another.

I never think at all when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them both well.

Studies perfect nature and are perfected still by experience.

When you know better, you do better.

You should always own a black dress because no one ever remembers a black dress.

We are not victims of aging, sickness and death. These are part of scenery, not the seer, who is immune to any form of change. This seer is the spirit, the expression of eternal being.

And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.

All wonder is the effect of novelty on ignorance.

What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man’s breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea, to discover a great thought – an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain-plough had gone over before. To find a new planet, to invent a new hinge, to find a way to make the lightning carry your messages. To be the first – that is the idea.

Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.

To cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.

The fortune which nobody sees makes a person happy and unenvied.

Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

What’s the point of having great knowledge and keeping them all to yourself?

Death then, being the way and condition of life, we cannot love to live if we cannot bear to die.

True godliness does not turn men out of the world, but enables them to live better in it and excites their endeavors to mend it.