Despise not sweet inviting love-making nor the merry dance.
Death is the last limit of all things.
Mediocrity is not allowed to poets, either by the gods or men.
Luck cannot change birth.
Gold loves to make its way through guards, and breaks through barriers of stone more easily than the lightning’s bolt.
The short span of life forbids us to spin out hope to any length. Soon will night be upon you, and the fabled Shades, and the shadowy Plutonian home.
The arrow will not always find the mark intended.
Those who covet much suffer from the want.
He who is always in a hurry to be wealthy and immersed in the study of augmenting his fortune has lost the arms of reason and deserted the post of virtue.
Seest thou how pale the sated guest rises from supper, where the appetite is puzzled with varieties? The body, too, burdened with I yesterday’s excess, weighs down the soul, and fixes to the earth this particle of the divine essence.
The body oppressed by excesses bears down the mind, and depresses to the earth any portion of the divine spirit we had been endowed with.
We are more speedily and fatally corrupted by domestic examples of vice, and particularly when they are impressed on our minds as from authority.
Envy is not to be conquered but by death.
The mind that is cheerful in its present state, will be averse to all solicitude as to the future, and will meet the bitter occurrences of life with a placid smile.
Amiability shines by its own light.
Seek not greatness, but seek truth and you will find both.
To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike.
Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
Do not think of knocking out another person’s brains because he differs in opinion from you. It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you differ from yourself ten years ago.
Let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen.