Parenting & Family Quote by Horace

Good writing, Horace suggests, doesn’t begin with sparkle; it begins with judgment. “Good sense” is doing a lot of quiet work here: not just intelligence, but proportion, restraint, an instinct for what matters and what doesn’t. In a culture that prized rhetoric and performance, Horace is staking out a sharper standard. Style isn’t a costume you put on language; it’s a consequence of clear thinking. The line is a preemptive strike on the aspiring poet who hopes meter, myth, or ornament can substitute for coherence.

The phrasing matters: “first principle” gives good sense a philosophical authority, while “parent source” makes it biological, generative. Writing isn’t manufactured by technique alone; it’s bred from a mind that can order experience. Horace’s intent is corrective and a little impatient, the voice of a poet who has watched cleverness get rewarded and has decided to name the underlying fraud. If your ideas are muddled, your sentences will eventually confess it.

Context helps sharpen the edge. Horace wrote in Augustan Rome, when literature was both art and social instrument, performed in elite circles where polish could masquerade as substance. His Ars Poetica is basically a field manual for taste, and taste, for Horace, is ethical as much as aesthetic: the discipline to avoid excess, the humility to revise, the courage to be plain when plain is truer.

Subtext: stop chasing “good writing” as an aesthetic effect. Chase clarity, integrity, and proportion, and the prose will follow like a shadow.