Horace

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.

Usually the modest person passes for someone reserved, the silent for a sullen person

Subdue your passion or it will subdue you.

The disgrace of others often keeps tender minds from vice.

Patience makes lighter What sorrow may not heal.

You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, yet she’ll be constantly running back.

A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.

Time is but the stream I go fishing in. I drink at it, but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. It’s thin current slides away, but eternity remains.

We have a problem. Congratulations. But it’s a tough problem. Then double congratulations.

Only in the darkness can you see the stars.

When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.

I suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being on a young soul to which they are totally unfit. Cannot we let people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make that man another you. One’s enough.

The wretched have no compassion, they can do good only from strong principles of duty.

Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true.

The cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy. It is the only dictator that free man acknowledges. It is the only security that free man desires.

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.

One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice; and it is not right to return an injury, or to do evil to any man, however much we have suffered from him.

The joys of parents are secret, and so are their grieves and fears.

We have to learn to be our own best friends because we fall too easily into the trap of being our own worst enemies.

Writers are the engineers of human souls.