Original artwork, not a still
Every one excels in something in which another fails.
Behind the line
What it means
Our interpretation.
A modest bit of wisdom: nobody is best at everything, and every person beats someone else at something. It reads like a typical Syrus maxim, which is why it travels under his name. The honest account is that it comes from a nineteenth-century translator's collection, not from a verified Latin line, so it is best quoted as 'attributed to'.
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In context
Spoilers for SententiaeShow the scene
Publilius Syrus was a Syrian-born slave brought to Italy in the first century BC, who won his freedom through wit and became a celebrated writer of maxims, the Sententiae. This sentence is not secure Syrus. It appears as Maxim 17 in Darius Lyman's 1856 English volume "The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, a Roman Slave", which gives no Latin and numbers its own maxims. Wikiquote files it under disputed quotations, warning that Lyman's book credits Syrus with many popular phrases he did not write. No Latin original in the standard lists of his sayings has been found for it.
Sources (1)
- Wikiquote: Publilius SyrusDisputed section, 'The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus' (Lyman, 1856), Maxim 17Reference checked
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