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
intuition reason instinct
What is now reason was formerly impulse or instinct.
skills making-love unending
Skill makes love unending.
temptation useless bows
Remove the temptation of idleness and Cupid's bow is useless.
marriage memories equal
If you would marry suitably, marry your equal.
ruins constitution idleness
Idleness ruins the constitution
envy cease
Envy feeds on the living. It ceases when they are dead.
envy fields crops
The heavier crop is ever in others' fields.
ancestry birth
Birth and ancestry, and that which we have not ourselves achieved, we can scarcely call our own.
sanity sane simulate
He who can simulate sanity will be sane.
pleasant
Pleasant words are the food of love.
granted pleasure duty
The pleasure that is granted to me from a sense of duty ceases to be a pleasure at all.
poetry mind fine
Poetry comes fine-spun from a mind at peace.
daring unsafe
Against the bold, daring is unsafe.
mistake sibling doors
Virtue and vice, evil and good, are siblings, or next-door neighbors, Easy to make mistakes, hard to tell them apart.