Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Pulvis et umbra sumsu." ~ Horace, Odes ("We are dust and Shadows")
This poem will never reach its destination. On Rousseau's Ode To Posterity
One word of praise from a woman is dearer to me than a whole ode from a man . .
Horace's best ode would not please a young woman as much as the mediocre verses of the young man she is in love with.
Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero'Snatch at today and trust as little as you can in tomorrow' - (Odes) Often translated as 'Seize the day'.
Had I but written as many odes in praise of Muhammad and Ali as I have composed for King Mahmud, they would have showered a hundred blessings on me.
A poem with grandly conceived and executed stanzas, such as one of Keats's odes, should be like an enfilade of rooms in a palace: one proceeds, with eager anticipation, from room to room.
The pleasures of love proceed successively from a distich to a quatrain, from a quatrain to a sonnet, from a sonnet to a ballad, from a ballad to an ode, from an ode to a cantata, and from a cantata to a dithyramb. A husband who begins with the dithyramb is a fool.
Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and seemingly, that of the wildest odes, [has] a logic of its own as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more and more fugitive causes. In the truly great poets... there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word.
