Ovid
Ovid
Publius Ovidius Naso, known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a contemporary of the older Virgil and Horace with whom he is often ranked as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature. The Imperial scholar Quintilian considered him the last of the Latin love elegists. He enjoyed enormous popularity, but, in one of the mysteries of literary history, he was sent by Augustus into exile...
NationalityRoman
ProfessionPoet
ancestry birth
Birth and ancestry, and that which we have not ourselves achieved, we can scarcely call our own.
agriculture fields exhausted
A field becomes exhausted by constant tillage.
hate wish destroyed
He whom all hate all wish to see destroyed.
sanity sane simulate
He who can simulate sanity will be sane.
speech eloquent
Only begin, and you will become eloquent of yourself.
hands length tolerable
A wound will perhaps become tolerable with length of time; but wounds which are raw shudder at the touch of the hands.
long clouded ifs
So long as you are secure you will count many friends; if your life becomes clouded you will be alone.
pure
Pure women are only those who have not been asked.
middle
You will be safest in the middle.
pleasant
Pleasant words are the food of love.
cures thousand
A thousand ills require a thousand cures.
granted pleasure duty
The pleasure that is granted to me from a sense of duty ceases to be a pleasure at all.
years taught prison
Where crime is taught from early years, it becomes a part of nature.
wind calumny slander
Calumny ever pursues the great, even as the winds hurl themselves on high places.