Horace

Make a good use of the present.

He will be loved when dead, who was envied when he was living.

Why harass with eternal purposes a mind to weak to grasp them?

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

He has the deed half done who has made a beginning.

It is your concern when your neighbor’s wall is on fire.

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

Experience is in the fingers and head. The heart is inexperienced.

To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.

Which is worse? The wolf who cries before eating the lamb or the wolf who does not.

The only reward of virtue is virtue the only way to have a friend is to be one.

As an example to others, and not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep and never to refrain when awake.

All diseases run into one, old age.

Don’t think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drive into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark.

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: “O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.” And God granted it.

Drunkenness spoils health, dismounts the mind, and unmans man. It reveals secrets, is quarrelsome, lascivious, impudent, dangerous, and mad.

Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run.

Reality is a sliding door.

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

Let your literary compositions be kept from the public eye for nine years at least.