Horace Quotes

The present age has seen a great slump in humanist values.

MY INSPIRATION has always been Jeanne Calment, a Frenchwoman who smoked and drank every day and died a few years ago at the age of 122. When asked the secret of her longevity, she replied: 'I laugh a lot.' Well you would, wouldn't you.

His jest will savour but of shallow wit, When thousands weep, more than did laugh at it.

What a fool cannot learn he laughs at, thinking that by his laughter he shows superiority instead of latent idiocy.

Naturally, grown-up citizens are concerned about the beatniks and delinquents. ... The question is why the grownups do not, more soberly, draw the same conclusions as the youth. Or, since no doubt many people are quite clear about the connection that the structure of society that has becoming increasingly dominant in our country is disastrous to the growth of excellence and manliness, why don't more people speak up and say so?

We know that inevitably the millennials will get old and tired again, and then there will be the bilennials or trilennials, or whatever the next generation is, and we're all going to end up on our lawn shaking our fists in a bathrobe yelling at the moon.

In the first act, you get the audience's attention - once you have it, they will repay you in the second. Play through the laughs if you have to. It will only make the audience believe there are so many of them that they missed a few.

Jesus is the purest among the mighty, and the mightiest among the pure, who, with his pierced hand has raised empires from their foundations, turned the stream of history from its old channel, and still continues to rule and guide the ages

The world laughs at another man's pain.

What is happening here is we are living past the age, by the millions, living past the age where cultural values make any sense at all.

Fitzgerald could sense that America was poised on the edge of a vast transformation, and wrote a novel bridging his moment and ours. The Great Gatsby made manifest precisely what Fitzgerald’s contemporaries couldn’t bear to see, and thus it is not only the Jazz Age novel par excellence, but also the harbinger of its decline and fall.

People seem to really enjoy laughing at me.

The real cultural war is between the culture of narcissism and what might be called the culture of renewal.

My dear, we live in an age of transition.

Can it be that we, too, are ready to embrace the foul concepts of atheism? Somebody is tampering with America's soul, I leave it to you who that somebody is.

Laughter tends to mock the pompous and the pretentious; all man's boastful gadding about, all his pretty pomps, his hoary customs, his wornout creeds, changing the glitter of them into the dullest hue of lead.

But they're laughing at you. They're not laughing with you.

Anyone who hears enough laughter and applause at a young age will become an actor, whether they intend to or not.

When I was a kid at 16, sneaking into a burlesque theater in downtown Detroit was a big thrill. Today, in every hotel room in America, you can turn on the television and see hardcore pornography. So the shifts can go both ways, and it's incumbent on us as leaders of the spiritual community to get as many people as possible to really begin to think in God-realized ways.

Today every city, town, or village is affected by it. We have entered the Neon Civilization and become a plastic world.. It goes deeper than its visual manifestations, it affects moral matters; we are engaged, as astrophysicists would say, on a decaying orbit.

No matter how you feel, you've got to be able to laugh at yourself. If you can laugh at Donald Trump, then you better be able to laugh at yourself, too. For us as comedians, we have to point out what's funny.

Nearly all literature, in one sense, is made up of guide-books. Old ones tell us the ways our fathers went, through the thoroughfares and courts of old; but how few of those former places can their posterity trace, amid avenues of modern erections; to how few is the old guide-book now a clew! Every age makes its own guide-books, and the old ones are used for waste paper.

The men who cannot laugh at themselves frighten me even more than those who laugh at everything.