Horace

A heart well prepared for adversity in bad times hopes, and in good times fears for a change in fortune.

I strive to be brief, and I become obscure.

A jest often decides matters of importance more effectual and happily than seriousness.

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

Usually the modest person passes for someone reserved, the silent for a sullen person

To have a great man for a friend seems pleasant to those who have never tried it; those who have, fear it.

There is nothing capricious in nature and the implanting of a desire indicates that its gratification is in the constitution of the creature that feel it.

Why is that others have so much faith in me, while I have so little? Why can’t I have the same belief in me that they have? Why can’t I see in myself, what they do? What is it that makes me, hold myself back? How many more hurdles do I need to overcome? There are so many questions that I have to find the answers to. And I will only find them by focusing and being completely honest with myself.

Nakedness is uncomely, as well in mind as body, and it addeth no small reverence to men’s manners and actions if they be not altogether open. Therefore set it down: That a habit of secrecy is both politic and moral.

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

Our best history is still poetry.

Without frugality none can be rich, and with it very few would be poor.

Good fame is like fire; when you have kindled you may easily preserve it; but if you extinguish it, you will not easily kindle it again.

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.

It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.

If man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles, or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.

If a man constantly aspires is he not elevated?

Eat therefore to live, and do not live to eat.

We are in fact convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself. It seems, to judge from the argument, that the wisdom which we desire and upon which we profess to have set our hearts will be attainable only when we are dead and not in our lifetime.