So live as brave men; and if fortune is adverse, front its blows with brave hearts

These words belong to Horace’s Satires II.2.135–136, not to Cicero: the Latin begins quocirca vivite fortes and ends fortiaque adversis opponite pectora rebus. The Latin Library text was read directly, and the English sentence was checked in the OCR of Wickham’s Horace for English Readers (1903), p. 215. Wickham includes the address to Ofellus’s sons that the circulating Cicero form omits. Wikiquote records the Cicero attribution as erroneous. The earliest English wording directly checked in this run is Wickham’s 1903 version; the date and route of the first false Cicero credit remain unestablished. Wikiquote’s misattribution note was consulted on 27 October 2026; that access date is not a dated historical appearance of the false credit.

1. 1903Earliest found · credited to Horace, with Ofellus as the speakerWickham publishes this English rendering as Horace; it is the earliest English form directly checked here, not a claim that the underlying thought originated in 1903.So live, my boys, as brave men; and if fortune is adverse, front its blows with brave hearts.Horace, Horace for English Readers: Being a Translation of the Poems of Quintus Horatius Flaccus into English Prose, translated by E. C. Wickham (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903), Satires II.2, p. 215; Satires II.2.135–136. Checked in the text of a page scan, not the image. Source

The actual passage closes Horace’s second satire of Book II. Horace represents Ofellus, a farmer who has lost ownership of his land but continues to work it as a tenant, explaining to his sons that property passes from one possessor to another. Ofellus concludes by urging courage against reverses of fortune. The English form closely follows E. C. Wickham’s 1903 prose translation, with the address to the boys dropped.

Meet changing fortune with courage rather than relying on property or present prosperity to make you secure.

It is neither a Cicero quotation nor Horace giving an autobiographical command in his own voice. The immediate speaker in the satire is Ofellus addressing his sons.

• Another public-domain translationSo live, my boys, as brave men; and if fortune is adverse, front its blows with brave hearts. E. C. Wickham’s 1903 public-domain translation of Horace. The address to the sons is present here but omitted from the form credited to Cicero. Copied from the scan OCR, with whitespace normalised. Where it was seen

Life, Courage, Wisdom

• Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. (misattributed) Ralph Waldo Emerson
• It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog. (misattributed) Mark Twain
• Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind. (misattributed) Bernard Baruch
• We may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated. Maya Angelou
• Why fit in when you were born to stand out? (not found) Dr. Seuss

• en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cicero
• thelatinlibrary.com/horace/serm2.shtml
• archive.org/details/horaceforenglish00horaiala
• en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_National_Biography,_1912_supplement/Wickham,_Edward_Charles

“So live as brave men; and if fortune is adverse, front its blows with brave hearts” Attributed to Marcus Tullius Cicero. No. Horace wrote it, not Cicero. Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/so-live-as-brave-men/ (checked 27 October 2026).

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