Horace Quotes

One may return to the place of his birth, He cannot go back to his youth.

What I possess, seems far away to me, and what is gone becomes reality.

Now that I think of it, she looked splendid. I wish I had met her somewhere else. I wish I had appreciated her as she deserved. I wish that everything had gone differently.

You cannot miss what you have never had.

This morning the world by moonlight seemed to be an immemorial acquaintance I had always meant to befriend. If there was ever a chance, it had passed. Strange to say, I feel a little that way about myself.

In reviewing my life, in tracing its course, I fill my cell with the pleasure of being what for want of a trifle I failed to be, recapturing, so that I may hurl myself into them as into dark pits, those moments when I strayed through the trap-ridden compartments of a subterranean sky

There are times in the lives of most of us, when we would have given all the world to be as we were but yesterday, though that yesterday had passed over us unappreciated and unenjoyed.

Some things you don't need until they leave you, they're the things that you miss.

I found myself in the changed man theory the other night thinking, "Yeah." I thought, "My god. If we could do this again," but there was nothing specific there. There's just the kind of vague sensation of how I'd like it to go. I allowed myself that gift to think that.

It's such a colossal effort not to be haunted by what's lost, but to be enchanted by what was.

Don't let your life pass you by, weep not for the memories.

We only appreciate what we have when we lose it.

What made something precious? Losing it and finding it.

It was the last time she’d see the river from that window. The last time of anything has the poignancy of death itself. This that I see now, she thought, to see no more this way. Oh, the last time how clearly you see everything; as though a magnifying light had been turned on it. And you grieve because you hadn’t held it tighter when you had it every day.

How readily we wish time spent revoked, that we might try the ground again where once--through inexperience, as we now perceive--we missed that happiness we might have found!

No, I don’t live in heartache. I don’t cry myself to sleep or any of that. I am, I tell myself, over it. But I do feel a void, icky as that sounds. And—like it or not—I still think about her every single day.

Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.

Consider pleasures as they depart, not as they come.

Everything I loved became everything I've lost.

A lot of people say if they could go back in time they would not change anything. But, to be honest with you, I like it and I don't like it. I like the fact that all I went through as a youngster made me a great man, but just goin' through what I went through - I wouldn't wanna go through that again. I wouldn't wish that on nobody.

Funny, 'ow you can 'old a jewel in your 'and, and toss it away, and not even know what you 'ad until it's gone.

I wandered through the streets thinking of all the things I might have said and might have done had I been other than I was.

Oh, give me back the good old days of fifty years ago,“ has been the cry ever since Adam's fifty-first birthday.

You can tell it any way you want but that's the way it is. I should of done it and I didnt. And some part of me has never quit wishin I could go back. And I cant. I didn't know you could steal your own life. And I didnt know that it would bring you no more benefit than about anything else you might steal. I thinkI done the best with itI knew how but itstill wasntmine. It neverhas been.

Most of us don't know about happiness until it's over.