Love binds people too, in matrimony's sacred bonds where chaste lovers are met, and friends cement their trust and friendship. How happy is mankind, if the love that orders the stars above rules, too, in your hearts.

In every kind of adversity, the bitterest part of a man's affliction is to remember that he once was happy.

If there is anything good about nobility it is that it enforces the necessity of avoiding degeneracy.

Inconsistency is my very essence; it is the game I never cease to play as I turn my wheel in its ever changing circle, filled with joy as I bring the top to the bottom and the bottom to the top

Give me Thy light, and fix my eyes on Thee!

No man can ever be secure until he has been forsaken by Fortune.

I who once wrote songs with keen delight am now by sorrow driven to take up melancholy measures. Wounded Muses tell me what I must write, and elegiac verses bathe my face with real tears. Not even terror could drive from me these faithful companions of my long journey. Poetry, which was once the glory of my happy and flourishing youth, is still my comfort in this misery of my old age.