Best 514 quotes in «latin quotes» category

I don't know what I'm doing in Santa Teresa," Amalfitano said to himself after he'd been living in the city for a week. "Don't you? Don't you really?" he asked himself. "Really I don't," he said to himself. And that was as eloquent as he could be.

I'd studied Latin for five years now, which meant that I could, on rare occasions, actually translate something.

If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found the time to conquer the world.

Illegitimis nil carborundum.

IN ENGLISH, words of Latin origin tend to carry overtones of intellectual, moral and aesthetic “classiness"—overtones which are not carried, as a rule, by their Anglo-Saxon equivalents. “Maternal,” for instance, means the same as “motherly,” “intoxicated” as “drunk”—but with what subtly important shades of difference! And when Shakespeare needed a name for a comic character, it was Sir Toby Belch that he chose, not Cavalier Tobias Eructation.

In perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale. (Forever and ever, brother, hail and farewell.)

If there's a password needed at the gates of heaven, only Latin will unlock it, he thinks.

I should think a dead language would be rather boring, socially speaking.

Ira furor brevis est: animum rege: qui nisi paret imperat. (Anger is a brief madness: govern your mind [temper], for unless it obeys it commands.)

Is it not lack of faith that leads men to fear the scrutiny of reason? If the destination is doubtful, than the path must be fraught with fear. A robust faith need not fear, for if God exists, then reason cannot help but lead us to Him. Cogito, ergo Deus est,'says St. Augustine, I think, therefore God is.

It was my first-year Latin teacher in high school who made me who made me discover I'd fallen in love with it (grammar). It took Latin to thrust me into bona fide alliance with words in their true meaning. Learning Latin fed my love for words upon words in continuation and modification, and the beautiful, sober, accretion of a sentence. I could see the achieved sentence finally standing there, as real, intact, and built to stay as the Mississippi State Capitol at the top of my street.

In accordance with the centuries-old tradition of the Latin rite, the Latin language is to be retained by clerics in the divine office.

I started studying law, but this I could stand just for one semester. I couldn't stand more. Then I studied languages and literature for two years. After two years I passed an examination with the result I have a teaching certificate for Latin and Hungarian for the lower classes of the gymnasium, for kids from 10 to 14. I never made use of this teaching certificate. And then I came to philosophy, physics, and mathematics. In fact, I came to mathematics indirectly. I was really more interested in physics and philosophy and thought about those. It is a little shortened but not quite wrong to say: I thought I am not good enough for physics and I am too good for philosophy. Mathematics is in between.

Ite, inflammate omnia.

I think we can all agree that the official language of the United States should be Latin.

It sounds to me, dear, as if your satirist is a bit like a monk. They both take a rather dim view of the world, and both try to do something about it." "Thank you, Father Joe! I think I knew that once, but I'd forgotten. Contemptus mundi. We both have contempt for the world." "You p-p-persist in your error, my son. Contemptus does not mean 'contempt.' It means 'detachment.' Are you detached from the things you satirize?

Mathemata mathematicis scribuntur.

Mulier cupido quod dicit amanti, in vento et rapida scribere oportet aqua ((What woman says to fond lover should be written on air or the swift water)

Morituri te salutant!

My Name Is Latif Mercado, And I Am... A Workaholic!

My Friends I Will Always Remember, And My Enemies I Will Never Forget!

Non nobis solum nati sumus. (Not for ourselves alone are we born.)

Non est ad astra mollis e terris via" - "There is no easy way from the earth to the stars

Not Even The Greatest Sculptor Can Mold A Masterpiece Out Of Shit!

Loyaute me lie - Loyalty Binds Me

Of all the awful things demons do, keeping Latin alive when it deserves to be a dead language might be the worst. To say nothing of ancient Sumerian. And ancient Sumerian translated into Latin? Diabolic.

Newcomers to manuscripts sometimes ask what such books tell us about the societies that created them. At one level, these Gospel Books describe nothing, for they are not local chronicles but standard Latin translations of religious texts from far away. At the same time, this is itself extraordinarily revealing about Ireland. No one knows how literacy and Christianity had first reached the islands of Ireland, possibly through North Africa. This was clearly no primitive backwater but a civilization which could now read Latin, although never occupied by the Romans, and which was somehow familiar with the texts and artistic designs which have unambiguous parallels in the Coptic and Greek churches, such as carpet pages and Canon tables. Although the Book of Kells itself is as uniquely Irish as anything imaginable, it is a Mediterranean text and the pigments used in making it include orpiment, a yellow made from arsenic sulphide, exported from Italy, where it is found in volcanoes. There are clearly lines of trade and communication unknown to us.

Omnes feriunt, ultima necat.

(on the word "fuck") 'Oh, come on, Mum,' I sighed at her protest. 'It's just an old Anglo-Saxon word for the female organ which has been adopted by an inherently misogynist language as a negative epithet. It's the same as "fuck", it basically means the same as copulate, but the latter is perfectly acceptable. Why? Because copulate has its roots in Latin and Latin reminds us that we are a sophisticated, learned species, not the rutting animals that these prehistoric grunts would have us appear to be, and isn't that really the issue here? We don't want to admit that we are essentially animals? We want to distinguish ourselves from the fauna with grand conceits and elaborate language; become angels worthy of salvation, not dumb creatures consigned to an earthly, terminal end. It's just a word, Mum; a sound meaning a thing; and your disgust is just denial of a greater horror: that our consciousness is not an indication of our specialness but the terrifying key to knowing how truly insignificant we are.' She told me to got fuck myself.

Nunquam reliquiae redire: carpe omniem impremis (Never go back for seconds: take it all the first time)

Omnia mutantur; nihil interit

On the third, directly before me, were embedded more polished letters: PER OMNIA SAECULA SAECULORUM. For ever and ever. In the red light, the brushed steel glowed softly, like embers. The polish letters blazed. Without a hiss, For ever and ever slid aside, as though inviting me to eternity.

Out in the field, any connection with home just makes you weaker. It reminds you that you were once civilized, soft; and that can get you killed faster than a bullet through the head.

Particular law remaining in force, the use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin rites.

Pactum serva" - "Keep the faith

Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu

Saepa stilum vertas, iterum quae digna legi sint scripturas. (Turn the stylus [to erase] often if you would write something worthy of being reread.)

Sadly, the natural world is not short of people who believe that rattling off Latin names incessantly makes them appear clever, whereas most of us know instinctively that this suggests insecurity at best, but possibly social and sexual dysfunction as well. If somebody corrects you sternly by using an obtuse name for something, they probably know neither human nature nor any other kind very profoundly.

quod defles, illud amasti.

Rarus enim ferme sensus communis in illa Fortuna." ["Generally common sense is rare in that (higher) rank."]

That is why tending to our own emotions, and the pain and suffering we’re experiencing is so important, because we are not only healing our own souls, but also healing the Anima Mundi, which is Latin for “the soul of the world.

Stultum est timere quod vitare non potes

That's so," said Eliza. "Vacation ends next month. I start Latin this year. They say it's awful. You decline nouns. All _I_ can say is, who wouldn't?

That was a good mark in Latin, and I am pleased with your steady improvement in it.

The cart slowed as they came to a place so dark and quiet that it seemed as if they had entered some remote forest. Peeking beneath the hem of the cart's canvas covering, Garrett saw towering gates covered with ivy, and ghostly sculptures of angels, and solemn figures of men, women, and children with their arms crossed in resignation upon their breasts. Graveyard sculptures. A stab of horror went through her, and she crawled to the front of the cart to where West Ravenel was sitting with the driver. "Where the devil are you taking us, Mr. Ravenel?" He glanced at her over his shoulder, his brows raised. "I told you before- a private railway station." "It looks like a cemetery." "It's a cemetery station," he admitted. "With a dedicated line that runs funeral trains out to the burial grounds. It also happens to connect to the main lines and branches of the London Ironstone Railroad, owned by our mutual friend Tom Severin." "You told Mr. Severin about all this? Dear God. Can we trust him?" West grimaced slightly. "One never wants to be in the position of having to trust Severin," he admitted. "But he's the only one who could obtain clearances for a special train so quickly." They approached a massive brick and stone building housing a railway platform. A ponderous stone sign adorned the top of the carriage entrance: Silent Gardens. Just below it, the shape of an open book emblazoned with words had been carved in the stone. Ad Meliora. "Toward better things," Garrett translated beneath her breath.

The difficulty of learning the dead languages does not arise from any superior abstruseness in the languages themselves, but in their being dead, and the pronunciation entirely lost. It would be the same thing with any other language when it becomes dead. The best Greek linguist that now exists does not understand Greek so well as a Grecian plowman did, or a Grecian milkmaid; and the same for the Latin, compared with a plowman or a milkmaid of the Romans; and with respect to pronunciation and idiom, not so well as the cows that she milked. It would therefore be advantageous to the state of learning to abolish the study of the dead languages, and to make learning consist, as it originally did, in scientific knowledge.

The most satisfying of languages, Latin.

The original is displayed in a special darkened shrine now called the Treasury, at the eastern end of the library at Trinity College in Dublin, and over 520,000 visitors queue to see it every year, buying colored and numbered admission tickets to the Book of Kells exhibition. More than 10,000,000 people filed past the glass cases in the first two decades after the opening of the present display in 1992. The daily line of visitors waiting to witness a mere Latin manuscript are almost incredible. There are signposts to the 'Book of Kells' across Dublin. The new tram stop outside the gates of Trinity College is named after the manuscript. No other medieval manuscript is such a household name, even if people are not always sure what it is.

There's nothing quite like Latin for disguising the fact that you're making it up as you go along.

The spiritual muscles I hadn't used for decades began to acquire some tone, and since they were Catholic muscles too, it was natural to look for a church to work out in. It was hard. Appalling though the predations exacted on the monastic liturgy were, they were nothing compared to the desecration exacted on the secular. Latin was gone entirely, replaced by dull, oppressive, anchorman English, slavishly translated from its sonorous source to be as plain and "direct" as possible. It didn't seem to have occurred to the well-meaning vandals who'd thrown out baby, bath, and bathwater that all ritual is a reaching out to the unknowable and can be accomplished only by the noncognitive: evocation, allusion, metaphor, incantation—the tools of the poet.