Quotes About Horace

If a man's fortune does not fit him, it is like the shoe in the story; if too large it trips him up, if too small it pinches him.

I have to submit to much in order to pacify the touchy tribe of poets.

You ask me why a soft numbness diffuses all my inmost senses with deep oblivion, as though with thirsty throat I'd drained the cup that brings the sleep of Lethe.

One gains universal applause who mingles the useful with the agreeable, at once delighting and instructing the reader.

If profanity had an influence on the flight of the ball, the game of golf would be played far better than it is.

The gentle maid, whose hapless tale, these melancholy pages speak; say, gracious lady, shall she fail To draw the tear a down from thy cheek?

It is sinful to cherish those whom heaven has doomed to destruction.

Driving Horace and Margot smoothly to the Armory, the new cabdriver thought about basketball. Why do they always applaud the man who makes the shot? Why don't they applaud the ball? It is the ball that actually goes into the net. The man doesn't go into the net. Never have I seen a man going into the net.

The other chief Romans were Catullus and Horace: Catullus—a dozen short poems and stretches of the Attis—because the young are prone (at least I was) to identify themselves with him when feeling angry, lonely, misunderstood, besotted, ill-starred or crossed in love. I probably adored Horace for the opposite reason; and taught myself a number of the Odes and translated a few of them into awkward English sapphics and alcaics.