Horace

I shall not wholly die, and a great part of me will escape the grave.

Let us my friends snatch our opportunity from the passing day.

I am not bound over to swear allegiance to any master; where the storm drives me I turn in for shelter.

Help a man against his will and you do the same as murder him.

Suffering is but another name for the teaching of experience, which is the parent of instruction and the schoolmaster of life.

Nothing’s beautiful from every point of view.

The German intellect wants the French sprightliness, the fine practical understanding of the English, and the American adventure; but it has a certain probity, which never rests in a superficial performance, but asks steadily, To what end? A German public asks for a controlling sincerity.

What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

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

Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities.

The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

The teacher reminded us that Romes liberties were not auctioned off in a day, but were bought slowly, gradually, furtively, little by little; first with a little corn and oil for the exceedingly poor and wretched, later with corn and oil for voters who were not quite so poor, later still with corn and oil for pretty much every man that had a vote to sellexactly our own history over again.

I lose my respect for the man who can make the mystery of sex the subject of a coarse jest, yet when you speak earnestly and seriously on the subject, is silent.

All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.

If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?

Talent for talent’s sake is a bauble and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power as a benefactor.

As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.

He looks the whole world in the face for he owes not any man.

Justice is my being allowed to do whatever I like. Injustice is whatever prevents my doing so.