Horace Quotes

222 Sourced Quotes

In Rome you long for the country; in the country— oh inconstant! —you praise the distant city to the stars.

Horace
How light, how small is the thing which casts down or restores a mind greedy for praise.

Horace
The mind enamored with deceptive things, declines things better.

Horace
A host is like a general: misfortunes often reveal his genius.

Horace
It is not the rich man you should properly call happy, but him who knows how to use with wisdom the blessings of the gods, to endure hard poverty, and who fears dishonor worse than death, and is not afraid to die for cherished friends or fatherland.

Horace
Look round and round the man you recommend, For yours will be the shame should he offend.

Horace
We rarely find anyone who can say he has lived a happy life, and who, content with his life, can retire from the world like a satisfied guest.

Horace
I hate the common herd of men and keep them
afar. Let there be sacred silence: I, the Muses' priest, sing for girls and boys songs not heard before.

Horace
He who has begun has half done. Dare to be wise; begin!

Horace
Cease to ask what the morrow will bring forth, and set down as gain each day that Fortune grants.

Horace
I have to put up with a lot, to please the touchy breed of poets.

Horace
Tomorrow once again we sail the Ocean Sea.

Horace
This was among my prayers: a piece of land not so very large, where a garden should be and a spring of ever-flowing water near the house, and a bit of woodland as well as these.

Horace
Happy, thrice happy and more, are they whom an unbroken bond unites and whose love shall know no sundering quarrels so long as they shall live.

Horace
Cease your efforts to find where the last rose lingers.

Horace
The happy state of winning the palm without the dust of racing.

Horace
Often a purple patch or two is tacked on to a serious work of high promise, to give an effect of color.

Horace
It is sensible to dismiss the old horse in good time, lest, failing at the last, he makes the spectators laugh.

Horace
The case will be dismissed with a laugh. You will get off scot-free.

Horace
Not gods, nor men, nor even booksellers have put up with poets being second-rate.

Horace
Don't yield to that alluring witch, laziness, or else be prepared to surrender all that you have won in your better moments.

Horace
Taught or untaught, we all scribble poetry.

Horace
Who can hope to be safe? who sufficiently cautious?
Guard himself as he may, every moment's an ambush.

Horace
And seek for truth in the groves of Academe.

Horace
Pale Death breaks into the cottages of the poor as into the castles of kings.

Horace
Mix a little foolishness with your prudence: it's good to be silly at the right moment.

Horace
There is a mean in things, fixed limits on either side of which right living cannot get a foothold.

Horace
The brave are born from the brave and good. In steers and in horses is to be found the excellence of their sire; nor do savage eagles produce a peaceful dove.

Horace
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.

Horace
Let us both small and great push forward in this work, in this pursuit, if to our country, if to ourselves we would live dear.

Horace