Horace

Anger is a brief lunacy.

Anger is a momentary madness, so control your passion or it will control you.

While fools shun one set of faults they run into the opposite one.

Those that are little, little things suit.

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

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

You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother’s milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

Rituals are important. Nowadays it’s hip not to be married. I’m not interested in being hip.

The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity… The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little, you gain the great.

All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.

It is at our mother’s knee that we acquire our noblest and truest and highest ideals, but there is seldom any money in them.

That which we call sin in others, is experiment for us.

I have not a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming vices.

Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.

Arguments are like fire-arms which a man may keep at home but should not carry about with him.

Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.

Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare.

There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.