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
air vulgar nations
I do not dislike the French from the vulgar antipathy between neighboring nations, but for their insolent and unfounded air of superiority.
exercise world gunpowder
Exercise is the worst thing in the world and as bad an invention as gunpowder.
real fate reflection
Perhaps those, who, trembling most, maintain a dignity in their fate, are the bravest: resolution on reflection is real courage.
genius taste wanted
One of the greatest geniuses that ever existed, Shakespeare, undoubtedly wanted taste.
bad-company obliged ifs
I shun authors, and would never have been one myself, if it obliged me to keep such bad company.
soil rogues lawyer
Lawyers and rogues are vermin not easily rooted out of a rich soil.
thinking hands wings
Two clergymen disputing whether ordination would be valid without the imposition of both hands, the more formal one said, "Do you think the Holy Dove could fly down with only one wing?
light satisfaction results
It amazes me when I hear any person prefer blindness to deafness. Such a person must have a terrible dread of being alone. Blindness makes one totally dependent on others, and deprives us of every satisfaction that results from light.
responsibility garden optimism
We must cultivate our garden. Furia to God one day in seven allots; The other six to scandal she devotes. Satan, by false devotion never flammed, Bets six to one, that Furia will be damned.
queens hands drawing
In the drawing room [of the Queen's palace] hung a Venus and Cupid by Michaelangelo, in which, instead of a bit of drapery, the painter has placed Cupid's foot between Venus's thighs. Queen Caroline asked General Guise, an old connoisseur, if it was not a very fine piece? He replied "Madam, the painter was a fool, for he has placed the foot where the hand should be.
age might taste
Shakespeare had no tutors but nature and genius. He caught his faults from the bad taste of his contemporaries. In an age still less civilized Shakespeare might have been wilder, but would not have been vulgar.
pieces drs said
Dr. Calder [a Unitarian minister] said of Dr. [Samuel] Johnson on the publications of Boswell and Mrs. Piozzi, that he was like Actaeon, torn to pieces by his own pack.
women baths judgment
Lord Bath used to say of women, who are apt to say that they will follow their own judgment, that they could not follow a worse guide.
women sometimes enough
I have sometimes seen women, who would have been sensible enough, if they would have been content not to be called women of sense--but by aiming at what they had not, they only proved absurd--for sense cannot be counterfeited.