Horace

Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone.

Make a good use of the present.

The poets aim is either to profit or to please, or to blend in one the delightful and the useful. Whatever the lesson you would convey, be brief, that your hearers may catch quickly what is said and faithfully retain it. Every superfluous word is spilled from the too-full memory.

Tear thyself from delay.

Fidelity is the sister of justice.

Your own safety is at stake when your neighbor’s house is in flames.

Prosperity is the best protector of principle.

What you don’t do can be a destructive force.

In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.

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

We falsely attribute to men a determined character, putting together all their yesterdays and averaging them, we presume we know them. Pity the man who has character to support, it is worse than a large family, he is the silent poor indeed.

There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.

A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.

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.

There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles… but there is one order of beauty which seems made to turn the heads not only of men, but of all intelligent mammals, even of women. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle and to engage in conscious mischief -a beauty with which you can never be angry, but that you feel ready to crush for inability to comprehend the state of mind into which it throws you.

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

Have the courage to say no. Have the courage to face the truth. Do the right thing because it is right. These are the magic keys to living your life with integrity.

Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.

Only a stomach that rarely feels hungry scorns common things.

Society is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists – talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having.

Shame arises from the fear of men, conscience from the fear of God.