Horace

Sweet and glorious it is to die for our country.

I shall not wholly die, and a great part of me will escape the grave.

Does he council you better who bids you, Money, by right means, if you can: but by any means, make money?

Fierce eagles do not produce timorous doves.

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

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.

I am not able to instruct you. I can only tell that I have chosen wrong. I have passed my time in study without experience; in the attainment of sciences which can, for the most part, be but remotely useful to mankind. I have purchased knowledge at the expense of all the common comforts of life: I have missed the endearing elegance of female friendship, and the happy commerce of domestic tenderness.

This is your time and it feels normal to you but really there is no normal. There’s only change, and resistance to it and then more change.

When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.

Esther liked books out where everyone could see them, a sort of graphic index to the intricate labyrinth of her mind arrayed to impress the most casual guest, a system of immediate introduction which she had found to obtain in a number of grimy intellectual households in Greenwich Village.

We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting.

If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not an example.

There is no distinctly American criminal class – except Congress.

A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.

Passion is a sort of fever in the mind, which ever leaves us weaker than it found us.

The poets are only the interpreters of the Gods.

He liked to like people, therefore people liked him.

Give a man health and a course to steer, and he’ll never stop to trouble about whether he’s happy or not.

Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.

The most luxurious possession, the richest treasure anybody has, is his personal dignity.

A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those worth committing.