Horace

Good sense is both the first principal and the parent source of good writing.

Help a man against his will and you do the same as murder him.

In labouring to be concise, I become obscure.

I am not bound over to swear allegiance to any master; where the storm drives me I turn in for shelter.

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

Mountains will go into labour, and a silly little mouse will be born.

The worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving.

The affairs of the world will go on forever. Do not delay the practice of meditation.

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

What is so great as friendship, let us carry with what grandeur of spirit we can. Let us be silent, — so we may hear the whisper of the gods. Let us not interfere. Who set you to cast about what you should say to the select souls, or how to say any thing to such? No matter how ingenious, no matter how graceful and bland. There are innumerable degrees of folly and wisdom, and for you to say aught is to be frivolous. Wait, and thy heart shall speak. Wait until the necessary and everlasting overpowers you, until day and night avail themselves of your lips. The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.

How pleasant it is for a father to sit at his child’s board. It is like an aged man reclining under the shadow of an oak which he has planted.

Say a word, say a thousand to me on the telephone and I shall choose the wrong one to cling to as though you had said it after long deliberation when only I provoked it from you, I will cling to it from among a thousand, to be provoked and hurl it back with something I mean no more than you meant that, something for you to cling to and retreat clinging to.

One night awaits all, and death’s path must be trodden once and for all.

He who praises every body, praises nobody.

Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough.

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.

Every mind has a choice between truth and repose. Take which you please you can never have both.

If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner.

The way you think, the way you behave, the way you eat, can influence your life by 30 to 50 years.