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
bears shoulders wells
Weigh well what your shoulders can and cannot bear.
sweet should ready
With you I should love to live, with you be ready to die.
should knows
It is not permitted that we should know everything.
thinking may shoulders
Choose a subject equal to your abilities; think carefully what your shoulders may refuse, and what they are capable of bearing.
fiction should please
Fiction intended to please, should resemble truth as much as possible.
men standards should
Every man should measure himself by his own standard. [Lat., Metiri se quemque suo modulo ac pede verum est.]
should-have opposites race
Resistance to improvement contradicts the noblest instincts of the race. It begets its opposite. The fanaticism of reform is only the raging of the accumulated waters caused by the obstructions which an ultra conservatism has thrown across the stream of progress; and revolution itself is but the sudden overwhelming and sweeping away of impediments that should have been seasonably removed.
office enemy should
A fellow and his business should be bosom friends in the office and sworn enemies out of it.
body stimulation should
Were we all one body, we should lose the tremendous stimulation that comes from the present arrangement, and I fear that our uniformity would become the uniformity of death and the tomb.
guilty pale secrets turn wall
Be this your wall of brass, to have no guilty secrets, no wrong-doing that makes you turn pale
struggle
I struggle to be brief, and I become obscure.
died pride vain
Vain was the chief's, the sage's pride! They had no poet, and they died
fools-and-foolishness good mix silly
Mix a little foolishness with your prudence: it's good to be silly at the right moment. (Odes, bk. 4, no. 12, l. 27)
fools-and-foolishness lovely mix moment serious silly
Mix a little foolishness with your serious plans; it's lovely to be silly at the right moment