Horace

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

The poets aim is either to profit or to please, or to blend in one the delightful and the useful. Whatever the lesson you would convey, be brief, that your hearers may catch quickly what is said and faithfully retain it. Every superfluous word is spilled from the too-full memory.

You traverse the world in search of happiness, which is within the reach of every man. A contented mind confers it on all.

The avarice person is ever in want; let your desired aim have a fixed limit.

He who postpones the hour of living is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.

Labor diligently to increase your property.

Loyalty is still the same, whether it win or lose the game; true as a dial to the sun, although it be not shined upon.

The world is seldom what it seems; to man, who dimly sees, realities appear as dreams, and dreams realities.

The government who robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

Words are but the signs of ideas.

If you aren’t fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.

Poetry puts starch in your backbone so you can stand, so you can compose your life.

There are innumerable questions to which the inquisitive mind can in this state receive no answer: Why do you and I exist? Why was this world created? Since it was to be created, why was it not created sooner?

For most men, and most circumstances, pleasure –tangible material prosperity in this world -is the safest test of virtue. Progress has ever been through the pleasures rather than through the extreme sharp virtues, and the most virtuous have leaned to excess rather than to asceticism.

I have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also.

I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?

Too often the strong, silent man is silent only because he does not know what to say, and is reputed strong only because he has remained silent.

The human soul, by once suffering as much as it is capable of, purchases a strange and terrible immunity to all the rest of life’s sorrows.

There must be what Mr. Gladstone many years ago called a blessed act of oblivion. We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past. We must look to the future. We cannot afford to drag forward across the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past.

It was his peculiar happiness that he scarcely ever found a stranger whom he did not leave a friend; but it must likewise be added, that he had not often a friend long without obliging him to become a stranger.