There were some so afraid of death that they prayed for death.

So we must work at our profession and not make anybody else's idleness an excuse for our own. There is no lack of readers and listeners; it is for us to produce something worth being written and heard.

However often you may have done them a favour, if you once refuse they forget everything except your refusal.

Literature is both my joy and my comfort: it can add to every happiness and there is no sorrow it cannot console.

Perhaps you will ask whether I can raise these three millions without difficulty. Well, nearly all my capital is invested in land, but I have some money out at interest and I can borrow without any trouble.

Let us strive the more earnestly therefore to lengthen out our span of life-- life that is poured out like water and falls as the leaf-- if not by action (the means to which lie in another's power), yet in any case by study and research; and since it is not granted us to live long, let us transmit to posterity some memorial that we have at least lived.

In the pleading of cases nothing pleases so much as brevity.