Horace

This is a fault common to all singers, that among their friends they will never sing when they are asked; unasked, they will never desist.

Anger is a brief lunacy.

Seize the day, put no trust in tomorrow. [Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.Lat.]

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.

As a rule, adversity reveals genius and prosperity hides it.

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

Every great movement must experience three stages ridicule, discussion, adoption.

In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

When Satan makes impure verses, Allah sends a divine tune to cleanse them.

I’m proof against that word failure. I’ve seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

When you do the wrong thing, knowing it is wrong, you do so because you haven’t developed the habit of effectively controlling or neutralizing strong inner urges that tempt you, or because you have established the wrong habit and don’t know how to eliminate them effectively.

My prison shall be my grave before I will budge a jot; for I owe my conscience to no mortal man.

No matter how much or how little I knew technically, I was able to get the best out of people I worked with.

Wherever there is power there is age.

He is great who confers the most benefits.

There is but one step from the Academy to the Fad.

There is no life I know to compare with pure imagination. Living there, you’ll be free if you truly wish to be.

The faith that stands on authority is not faith.

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born -a hundred million years -and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.