A Quote by Horace
You will not rightly call him a happy man who possesses much; he more rightly earns the name of happy who is skilled in wisely using the gifts of the gods, and in suffering hard poverty, and who fears disgrace as worse than death.
Related Quotes
It is not the rich man you should properly call happy,
but him who knows how to use with wisdom the blessings of the gods,
to endure hard poverty, and who fears dishonor worse than death,
and is not afraid to die for cherished friends or fatherland.
Success is not rightly measured by the worldly standards of wealth, prestige and power. None of these bestow happiness unless they are rightly used. To use them rightly one must possess wisdom and love for God and man.
We rightly scorn those who have no made use of their defects, who have not exploited their deficiencies, and have not been enriched by their losses, as we despise any man who does not suffer at being a man or simply at being. Hence no graver insult can be inflicted than to call someone 'happy', no greater flattery than to grant him a 'vein of melancholy'... This is because gaiety is link to no important action and because, except for the mad, no one laughs when he is alone.
An unlucky rich man is more capable of satisfying his desires and of riding out disaster when it strikes, but a lucky man is better off than him...He is the one who deserves to be described as happy. But until he is dead, you had better refrain from calling him happy, and just call him fortunate.
Facts mean nothing unless they are rightly understood, rightly related and rightly interpreted.
The main purpose of life is to live rightly, think rightly, act rightly. The soul must languish when we give all our thought to the body.
To make a man perfectly happy tell him he works too hard, that he spends too much money, that he is "misunderstood" or that he is "different;" none of this is necessarily complimentary, but it will flatter him infinitely more than merely telling him that he is brilliant, or noble, or wise, or good.
If you want to make an ordinary man happy, or think that he is happy, give him money, power, flattery, gifts, honours. If you want to make a wise man happy - improve yourself!
A man is not rightly conditioned until he is a happy, healthy, and prosperous being; and happiness, health, and prosperity are the result of a harmonious adjustment of the inner with the outer of the man with his surroundings.
Christianity teaches that, contra fatalism, suffering is overwhelming; contra Buddhism, suffering is real; contra karma, suffering is often unfair; but contra secularism, suffering is meaningful. There is a purpose to it, and if faced rightly, it can drive us like a nail deep into the love of God and into more stability and spiritual power than you can imagine.
And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
The man who can see all gray, and red, and purples in a peach, will paint the peach rightly round, and rightly altogether. But the man who has only studied its roundness may not see its purples and grays, and if he does not will never get it to look like a peach; so that great power over color is always a sign of large general art-intellect.
Defer not charities till death; for certainly, if a man weigh it rightly, he that doth so is rather liberal of another man's than of his own.
Unless an action is rightly thought out and its steps rightly planned, every stage of its performance will probably remain vague and therefore unsatisfactory for the doer and all those concerned.
No young man starting in life could have better capital than plenty of friends. They will strengthen his credit, support him in every great effort, and make him what, unaided, he could never be. Friends of the right sort will help him more - to be happy and successful - than much money.
It is obviously easier, for the short run, to draw cheap labor from adjacent pools of poverty...than to find it among one's own people. And to the millions of such prospective immigrants from poverty to prosperity, there is, rightly or wrongly, no place that looks more attractive than the United States. Given its head, and subject to no restrictions, this pressure will find its termination only when the levels of overpopulation and poverty in the United States are equal to those of the countries from which these people are now so anxious to escape.
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