Horace Quotes

Those...who insist that there are some moral limits that they will not violate, are forever surprising themselves.

Some vices miss what is right because they are deficient, others because they are excessive, in feelings or in actions, while virtue finds and chooses the mean.

Ah, Miss Harriet, it would do us no harm to remember oftener than we do, that vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!

It is the function of vice to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.

Moderation in all things..

Moral qualities are so constituted as to be destroyed by excess and by deficiency . . .

Temperance and bravery, then, are ruined by excess and deficiency, but preserved by the mean.

If then, as we say, good craftsmen look to the mean as they work, and if virtue, like nature, is more accurate and better than any form of art, it will follow that virtue has the quality of hitting the mean. I refer to moral virtue [not intellectual], for this is concerned with emotions and actions, in which one can have excess or deficiency or a due mean.

Moral virtue is ... a mean between two vices, that of excess and that of defect, and ... it is no small task to hit the mean in each case, as it is not, for example, any chance comer, but only the geometer, who can find the center of a given circle.

Moral laws are set as a curb and restraint to these exorbitant desires, which they cannot be but by rewards and punishments, that will over-balance the satisfaction any one shall propose to himself in the breach of the law.

Most virtue lies between two vices.

The best things carried to excess are wrong.

Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use rather than total abstinence.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so.

Be not righteous overmuch.

In every extreme there is vice and not virtue.

… vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!

Temperate temperance is best; intemperate temperance injures the cause of temperance.

The boundary of man is moderation. When once we pass that pale our guardian angel quits his charge of us.

One can aim at honor both as one ought, and more than one ought, and less than one ought. He whose craving for honor is excessive is said to be ambitious, and he who is deficient in this respect unambitious; while he who observes the mean has no peculiar name.

Philosophy is an elegant thing, if anyone modestly meddles with it; but if they are conversant with it more than is becoming, it corrupts them.

Let him know how to choose the mean and avoid the extremes on either side, as far as possible. . . . For this is the way of happiness.

For both excessive and insufficient exercise destroy one's strength, and both eating and drinking too much or too little destroy health, whereas the right quantity produces, increases and preserves it. So it is the same with temperance, courage and the other virtues. This much then, is clear: in all our conduct it is the mean that is to be commended.

The golden mean in ethics, as in physics, is the centre of the system and that about which all revolve, and though to a distant and plodding planet it be an uttermost extreme, yet one day, when that planet's year is completed, it will be found to be central.

So it is clear that the search for what is just is a search for the mean; for the law is the mean.