Horace

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

It is the false shame of fools to try to conceal wounds that have not healed.

It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure.

It is a sweet and seemly thing to die for one’s country.

Mix a little foolishness with your serious plans. It is lovely to be silly at the right moment.

He gains everyone’s approval who mixes the pleasant with the useful.

We feel at first as if some opportunities of kindness and sympathy were lost, but learn afterward that any pure grief is ample recompense for all. That is, if we are faithful; for a spent grief is but sympathy with the soul that disposes events, and is as natural as the resin of Arabian trees. Only nature has a right to grieve perpetually, for she only is innocent. Soon the ice will melt, and the blackbirds sing along the river which he frequented, as pleasantly as ever. The same everlasting serenity will appear in this face of God, and we will not be sorrowful, if he is not.

Those who cross the sea change only the climate, not their character.

There can be no friendship where there is no freedom. Friendship loves a free air, and will not be fenced up in straight and narrow enclosures.

Mr. Emerson visited Thoreau at the jail, and the meeting between the two philosophers must have been interesting and somewhat dramatic. The account of the meeting was told me by Miss Maria Thoreau Henry Thoreaus auntHenry, why are you here? Waldo, why are you not here?

The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till the other is ready, and it may be along time before they get off.

One little bird not larger than a sparrow, it may have been a Phalarope, would alight on the turbulent surface where the breakers were five or six feet high, and float buoyantly there like a duck, cunningly taking to its wings and lifting itself a few feet through the air over the foaming crest of each breaker, but sometimes outriding safely a considerable billow which hid it some seconds, when its instinct told it that it would not break. It was a little creature thus to sport with the ocean, but it was as perfect a success in its way as the breakers in theirs.

Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.

Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, imaginatively; unless you can choose a challenge instead of competence.

As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.

Farmers are respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor.

The virtue in most request is conformity.

Flowers are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty out-values all the utilities of the world.

How can what an Englishman believes be hearsay? It is a contradiction in terms.

Strivers achieve what dreamers believe.

I could never be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.