Horace

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

If you would have me weep, you must first of all feel grief yourself.

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

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

Your own safety is at stake when your neighbor’s wall is ablaze.

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

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

Doing as others told me, I was blind. Coming when others called me, I was lost. Then I left everyone, myself as well. Then I found myself, myself as well.

Wake up, you’ve been sleeping. Take up your bed and walk. Stop blaming other people. Oh, it’s nobody else’s fault.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

It is always from a minority acting in ways different from what the majority would prescribe that the majority in the end learns to do better.

Virtue is too often merely local.

There’s a great joy in my giving. It’s thrilling. It’s exhilarating. It’s important to be a part of sharing. It is my love. It is my joy.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.

God’s first creature, which was light.

Sorrow makes us children again.

See, I think you live on earth a certain number of times until you finish what it is that you were meant to do here. And then you go on. I don’t think I’ll be back here. I think I’m done.

Put on the lights there, now. Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you’re not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos…

A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.