“He who postpones the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.”

— Horace, book Epistles

Book I, epistle ii, lines 41–42
Epistles (c. 20 BC and 14 BC)
Original: (la) Qui recte vivendi prorogat horam,
Rusticus exspectat dum defluat amnis.

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Horace92

Roman lyric poet -65–-8 BC

Vernon Howard (1918–1992) American writer

There Is A Way Out

“He, like all people who live with nature and know want, was patient and could wait calmly for hours, even days, without feeling either alarm or vexation”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

“A man who waits to believe in action before acting is anything you like, but he’s not a man of action.”

Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) French politician

Conversation with Jean Martet (18 December 1927), Ch. 11, p. 167.
Clemenceau, The Events of His Life (1930)
Context: A man who waits to believe in action before acting is anything you like, but he’s not a man of action. It is as if a tennis player before returning a ball stopped to think about his views of the physical and mental advantages of tennis. You must act as you breathe.

“And they say he's too young to surrender
And they cry out, and they call him by name.
Their graffiti tells how he's remembered.
Still, the River runs on just the same. Run River, run.”

River Phoenix (1970–1993) American actor, musician, and activist

River by Ellis Paul

“An excellent player, in my opinion, he is a modern player because he is a player who runs, marks, knows how to pass, cross, score goals and he is a leader on the field for Liverpool. So he is a player that I would like to have in my team.”

Steven Gerrard (1980) English footballer

Kaka on Steven Gerrard http://uk.reuters.com/article/2007/05/15/uk-soccer-champions-kaka-idUKL1540342020070515, (May 2006)

“I’m like a man who’s been half-asleep all his life, trying to find out what he was like before he woke up.”

Daniel Keyes book Flowers for Algernon

Source: Flowers for Algernon

“He who has waited long enough, will wait forever. And there comes the hour when nothing more can happen and nobody more can come and all is ended but the waiting that knows itself in vain.”

Samuel Beckett book Malone Dies

Malone Dies (1951)

“TV makes it so easy to postpone living for another half hour.”

Bill McKibben (1960) American environmentalist and writer

Source: The Age of Missing Information

“For he who fights and runs away
May live to fight another day;
But he who is in battle slain
Can never rise and fight again.”

Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774) Irish physician and writer

The Art of Poetry on a New Plan (1761), vol. ii. p. 147.
The saying "he who fights and runs away may live to fight another day" dates at least as far back as Menander (ca. 341–290 B.C.), Gnomai Monostichoi, aphorism #45: ἀνήρ ὁ ϕɛύγων καὶ ράλίν μαχήɛṯαί (a man who flees will fight again). The Attic Nights (book 17, ch. 21) of Aulus Gellius (ca. 125–180 A.D.) indicates it was already widespread in the second century: "...the orator Demosthenes sought safety in flight from the battlefield, and when he was bitterly taunted with his flight, he jestingly replied in the well-known verse: The man who runs away will fight again".

“The only thing that isn't worthless: to live this life out truthfully and rightly. And be patient with those who don't.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Hays translation
Source: Meditations (c. AD 121–180), Book VI, 47

“He who postpones the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.”

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