Life & Wisdom Quote by Horace

Horace has no patience for the comforting romance of extremes. In a single, tidy couplet he stages politics, philosophy, and temperament as a kind of drunken stagger: one person reels left, another right, and the punchline is that symmetry doesn’t equal wisdom. The line is built on balance - left/right, both/equally - only to undercut the reader’s instinct to pick a side. It’s not “centrism” as virtue-signaling; it’s diagnosis. Error is the constant, delusion the variable.

The verb “seduced” is doing the real work. People don’t arrive at their convictions by pure reason; they’re lured. Horace implies that ideology isn’t merely an argument but an appetite: we want a story that flatters our fears, our pride, our sense of being the sober one while everyone else sways. Different delusions, same outcome. That’s the subtextual jab - the human mind is less a tribunal than a marketplace of attractive lies.

Context matters: Horace wrote under the newly stabilized Roman order after civil wars, when “taking a side” wasn’t an abstract exercise but a lifestyle with a body count. His broader project, the via media of moderation and measured pleasure, isn’t timid neutrality; it’s survival wisdom from a culture that had watched faction become fate. The line flatters no camp. It offers a colder consolation: your opposite isn’t uniquely deranged. They’re just bewitched by another mirage.