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As we speak cruel time is fleeing. Seize the day, believing as little as possible in tomorrow.
- Keep clear of courts: a homely life transcends
- The vaunted bliss of monarchs and their friends.
- If you wish me to weep, you yourself
- Must first feel grief.
It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country.
Study carefully the character of the one you recommend, lest his misdeeds bring you shame.
- O Fortune, cruellest of heavenly powers,
- Why make such game of this poor life of ours?
We are but numbers, born to consume resources.
- So, if 'tis wealth that makes and keeps us blest,
- Be first to start and last to drop the quest.
If it is well with your belly, chest and feet, the wealth of kings can give you nothing more.
Life grants nothing to us mortals without hard work.
- Now say that it behoves us to adjust
- Our lives to nature (wisdom says we must):
- You want a site for building: can you find
- A place that's like the country to your mind?
He wins every hand who mingles profit with pleasure, by delighting and instructing the reader at the same time.
Fiction invented in order to please should remain close to reality.
Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant.
HORACE, attributed, Forty Thousand Quotations, Prose and Poetical
- For nature forms our spirits to receive
- Each bent that outward circumstance can give:
- She kindles pleasure, bids resentment glow,
- Or bows the soul to earth in hopeless woe.
The man who is tenacious of purpose in a rightful cause is not shaken from his firm resolve by the frenzy of his fellow citizens clamoring for what is wrong, or by the tyrant's threatening countenance.
For joys fall not to the rich alone, nor has he lived ill, who from birth to death has passed unknown.
A picture is a poem without words.
HORACE, attributed, Sura's Quotable Quotes
To flee vice is the beginning of virtue, and to have got rid of folly is the beginning of wisdom.
Whoever cultivates the golden mean avoids both the poverty of a hovel and the envy of a palace.
In adversity, remember to keep an even mind.
I am not bound over to swear allegiance to any master; where the storm drives me I turn in for shelter.
We are but dust and shadow.
The tiny ant, a creature of great industry, drags with its mouth whatever it can, and adds it to the heap which she is piling up, not unaware nor careless of the future.
It is good to labor; it is also good to rest from labor.
HORACE, attributed, Day's Collacon
They change their sky, not their mind, who cross the sea. A busy idleness possesses us: we seek a happy life, with ships and carriages: the object of our search is present with us.
HORACE, Epistles
Live today, tomorrow is not.
HORACE, Carmina
If all sane men were marked with chalk, and the insane with charcoal, there would soon be a scarcity of chalk.
HORACE, attributed, Day's Collacon
There is likewise a reward for faithful silence.
HORACE, Carmina
Never inquire into another man's secret; but conceal that which is entrusted to you, though pressed both by wine and anger to reveal it.
HORACE, Epistles
The shame is not in having sported, but in not having broken off the sport.
HORACE, Epistles
Don't yield to that alluring witch, laziness, or else be prepared to surrender all that you have won in your better moments.
We have all our vices, and the best
Is he who with the fewest is oppressed.
HORACE, attributed, Poetical Quotations from Chaucer to Tennyson
After serious matters, let us indulge in a season of sport.
HORACE, attributed, Day's Collacon
Strength, wanting judgment and policy to rule, overturneth itself.
HORACE, attributed, Day's Collacon
The wolf dreads the pitfall, the hawk suspects the snare, and the kite the covered hook.
HORACE, Epistles
Oh! thou who art greatly mad, deign to spare me who am less mad.
HORACE, Satires
Let's put a limit to the scramble for money.... Having got what you wanted, you ought to begin to bring that struggle to an end.
HORACE, Satires
He paints a dolphin in the woods, a boar in the waves.
HORACE, Ars Poetica
He appears mad indeed but to a few, because the majority is infected with the same disease.
HORACE, Satires
The best dowry a man can receive with his wife is good principles; for this is the dowry alone which preserves a family.
HORACE, attributed, Day's Collacon
He has not spent his life badly who has passed it from his birth to his burial in privacy.
HORACE, attributed, Day's Collacon
No property has a lasting tenure, and heir comes upon heir, as wave on wave; what real benefit is there in landed property and ever-increasing hoards?
HORACE, attributed, Day's Collacon
Perhaps Providence by some happy change will restore these things to their proper places.
HORACE, Epodi
Surely oak and threefold brass surrounded his heart, who first trusted a frail vessel to the merciless ocean.
HORACE, attributed, Day's Collacon
Sorrow wrings the sad soul, and bends it down to earth.
HORACE, attributed, Day's Collacon
What can be found equal to modesty, uncorrupt faith, the sister of justice, and undisguised truth?
HORACE, Carmina
Though you strut proud of your money, yet fortune has not changed your birth.
HORACE, Epodi
Merit hid from the public gaze has little advantage over sloth laid in the grave.
HORACE, attributed, Day's Collacon
Every man should wrap himself up in the mantle of his own integrity.
HORACE, attributed, Day's Collacon
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