Horace
Horace
Quintus Horatius Flaccus, known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus. The rhetorician Quintilian regarded his Odes as just about the only Latin lyrics worth reading: "He can be lofty sometimes, yet he is also full of charm and grace, versatile in his figures, and felicitously daring in his choice of words."...
NationalityRoman
ProfessionPoet
pain doe pleasure
Pleasure bought with pain does harm.
avert
Patience lightens the burthen we cannot avert.
men difficult accomplish
Nothing is so difficult but that man will accomplish it.
becoming wealth caution
When I caution you against becoming a miser, I do not therefore advise you to become a prodigal or a spendthrift.
toil
Nothing is achieved without toil.
mind care bats
Not treasured wealth, nor the consul's lictor, can dispel the mind's bitter conflicts and the cares that flit, like bats, about your fretted roofs.
summer spring heels
Summer treads on heels of spring.
suffering poverty may
Poverty urges us to do and suffer anything that we may escape from it, and so leads us away from virtue.
light confusion obscure
Not to create confusion in what is clear, but to throw light on what is obscure.
wrinkles age encroachment
Not even piety will stay wrinkles, nor the encroachments of age, nor the advance of death, which cannot be resisted.
truth moderation fortune
Receive, dear friend, the truths I teach, So shalt thou live beyond the reach Of adverse Fortune's pow'r; Not always tempt the distant deep, Nor always timorously creep Along the treach'rous shore.
vain cradle graves
Nor has he lived in vain, who from his cradle to his grave has passed his life in seclusion.
men faults born
No man is born without faults.
cutting failing knots
Ridicule often cuts the knot, where severity fails.