“Verse satire indeed is entirely our own.”

Without natural gifts technical rules are useless.

A laugh costs too much when bought at the expense of virtue.

When we cannot hope to win, it is an advantage to yield.

It is much easier to try one’s hand at many things than to concentrate one’s powers on one thing.

The learned understand the reason of art; the unlearned feel the pleasure.

Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly.

Sayings designed to raise a laugh are generally untrue and never complimentary. Laughter is never far removed from derision.

To swear, except when necessary, is becoming to an honorable man.

Give bread to a stranger, in the name of the universal brotherhood which binds together all men under the common father of nature.

If you direct your whole thought to work itself, none of the things which invade eyes or ears will reach the mind.

One should aim not at being possible to understand, but at being impossible to misunderstand.

While we ponder when to begin, it becomes too late to do.

From writing rapidly it does not result that one writes well, but from writing well it results that one writes rapidly.

Satiety is a neighbor to continued pleasures.

We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.

A man who tries to surpass another may perhaps succeed in equaling in not actually surpassing him, but one who merely follows can never quite come up with him: a follower, necessarily, is always behind.

Verse 11. (They presented unto Him gifts). The people of the east never approach the presence of kings and great personages, without a present in their hands.

Everything that’s prose isn’t verse and everything that isn’t verse is prose. Now you see what it is to be a scholar!

Eternity! How know we but we stand On the precipitous and crumbling verge Of Time e’en now, Eternity below?

All which is not prose is verse; and all which is not verse is prose.

You praise, in three hundred verses, Sabellus, the baths of Ponticus, who gives such excellent dinners. You wish to dine, Sabellus, not to bathe.

I overwhelmingly write from sadness – in songs, in prose, in verse.

I sell my pain in beauty. Wrap it in words. Package it in pleasantries, and deliver it in verse.

When I sit near the ocean in the morning and write my verses and breathe the salty wind which is coming from the water, I rejoice in God and I am blissful, as I was as a child.