Horace

When you introduce a moral lesson, let it be brief.

One gains universal applause who mingles the useful with the agreeable, at once delighting and instructing the reader.

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

He gains everyone’s approval who mixes the pleasant with the useful.

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

Youth is unduly busy with pampering the outer person.

Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.

Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.

Woman is a ray of God. She is not that earthly beloved: she is creative, not created.

Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.

Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.

It is better to walk alone, then with a crowd going in the wrong direction.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.

Nature… She pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, and her nay, nay.

Words are but the signs of ideas.

There is no sincerer love than the love of food.

There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.

Some critics will write ‘Maya Angelou is a natural writer’ – which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.

He that has given today may, if he so please, take away tomorrow.

Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.

Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.