Life & Wisdom Quote by Ovid

Nostalgia has always wanted to bully the present, and Ovid won’t let it. In a couple of smooth lines, he flips the ancient-world version of “things were better back then” into a sly vote for modernity: let them praise the old days; I’m glad I showed up after the so-called golden age. It’s a provocation dressed as modesty. By granting others permission to “state” the past’s goodness, he frames their certainty as mere talk, a performance. His “I think” is doing double duty: it sounds casual, but it also needles the absolutists who treat history like a settled verdict.

The subtext is generational self-defense. Ovid, writing in the Augustan era, is a poet of polish, artifice, and urban sophistication, not a bard of heroic austerity. The line quietly announces a set of aesthetic loyalties: give me refinement over ruggedness, wit over solemn virtue, the complicated pleasures of a fully developed culture over the myth of simpler greatness. It’s also politically legible. Augustus marketed his reign as a restoration of antique morals; Ovid’s cheeky preference for “late” reads like an underhanded refusal to cosplay the past, a warning that moral revivals often come with cultural policing.

What makes it work is the tight contrast and the casual swagger. He doesn’t argue; he shrugs. That shrug is the blade: in two beats, Ovid punctures the prestige of antiquity and makes the present feel not fallen, but chosen.