Horace

Live as brave men and face adversity with stout hearts.

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.

Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant.

Remember, when life’s path is steep, to keep your mind even.

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

My liver swells with bile difficult to repress.

Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character.

The knowledge of an unlearned man is living and luxuriant like a forest, but covered with mosses and lichens and for the most part inaccessible and going to waste; the knowledge of the man of science is like timber collected in yards for public works, which still supports a green sprout here and there, but even this is liable to dry rot.

Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.

To him whom contemplates a trait of natural beauty, no harm nor despair can come. The doctrines of despair, spiritual or political servitude, were never taught by those who shared the serenity of Nature. For each phase of Nature, though not invisible, is yet not too distinct or obtrusive. It is there to be found when we look for it, but not too demanding of our attention.

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water-drinkers.

Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.

A great man is always willing to be little.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.

As to conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I have not a very high opinion of that course.

If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself.

Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. I you look at it to admire it, you are lost.

If you employed study, thinking, and planning time daily, you could develop and use the power that can change the course of your destiny.

He is no wise man who will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.

Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves – slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.

Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles. What do we live for if not to make the world less difficult for each other?