Ovid Quotes

“Rest in Peace?’ Why that phrase? That’s the most ridiculous phrase I’ve ever heard! You die, and they say ‘Rest in Peace!’ …Why would one need to ‘rest’ when they’re dead?! I spent thousands of years of world history resting. While Agamemnon was leading his ships to Troy, I was resting. While Ovid was seducing women at the chariot races, I was resting. While Jeanne d’Arc was hallucinating, I was resting. I wait until airplanes are scuttling across the sky to burst out onto the scene, and I’m only going to be here for a short while, so when I die, I certainly won’t need to rest again! Not while more adventures of the same kind are going on.”
― Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy

“The cause is hidden. The effect is visible to all.”
― Ovid

“Childhood is bound like the Gordian knot with my memories of the Black Sea, and I still feel its waters welling up within me today. Sometimes these waters are leaden, as grey as the military ships that sail on their curved expanses, and sometimes they are blue as pigmented cobalt. Then would come dusk, when I would sit and watch the seabirds waver to shore, flitting from open waters to the quiet empty vastlands in darkening spaces behind me, the same birds Ovid once saw during his exile, perhaps; and the same waters the Argonauts crossed searching for the fleece of renewal.

And out in the distance, invisible, the towering heights of Caucasus, where once-bright memories of the fire-thief have transmuted into something weird and many-faceted, and beyond these, pitch-black Karabakh in dolorous Armenia.”
― Paul Christensen, The Heretic Emperor

“And besides, we lovers fear everything”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses

“All right, boy, skewer me. I've dropped my defenses,
I'm an easy victim. Why, by now
Your arrows practically know their own way to the target
And feel less at home in their quiver than in me.”
― Ovid, The Erotic Poems

“Nothing retains its original form, but Nature, the goddess of all renewal, keeps altering one shape into another. Nothing at all in the world can perish, you have to believe me; things merely vary and change their appearance. What we call birth
is merely becoming a different entity; what we call death is ceasing to be the same. Though the parts may possibly shift
their position from here to there, the wholeness in nature is constant.”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses

“My hopes are not always realized, but I always hope.”
― Ovid

“What did Sappho of Lesbos teach but how to love women?”
― Ovid, The Tristia of Ovid

“Dicere quae puduit, scribere jussit amor”
― Ovid

“I am the daughter of a mother who would never change...The refusal to modify her aspect, her habits, her attitudes was strategy for resisting American culture, for fighting it, for maintaining her identity...When my mother returns to Calcutta, she is proud of the fact that, in spite of almost fifty years away from India, she seems like a woman who never left.

I am the opposite. While the refusal to change was my mother's rebellion, the insistence on transforming myself is mine...All my life I've tried to get away from the void of my origin. It was the void that distressed me, that I was fleeing...Writing, I discovered a way of hiding in my characters, of escaping myself. Of undergoing one mutation after another.

One could say that the mechanisms of metamorphosis is the only element of life that never changes. The journey of every individual, every country, every historical epoch, of the entire universe and all it contains, is nothing but a series of changes, at times subtle, at times deep, without which we would stand still. The moments of transitions in which something changes, constitute the backbone of all of us. Whether they are a salvation or a loss, they are moments we tend to remember. They give a structure to our existence. Almost all the rest is oblivion.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, In Other Words

“My vessel is launched on the boundless main and my sails are spread to the wind ! In the whole of the world there is nothing that stays unchanged. All is in flux. Any shape that is formed is constantly shifting.
Time itself flows steadily by in perpetual motion. Think of a river: no river can ever arrest its current, nor can the fleeting hour. But as water is forced downstream
by the water behind it and presses no less on the water ahead, so time is in constant flight and pursuit, continually new. The present turns into the past and the future replaces the present; every moment that passes is new and eternally changing.”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses

“No matter how long the sun may linger on his long and weary journey, at length evening comes with its sacred song.”
― Brian Friel, Translations

“Lesbia quid docuit Sappho nisi amare puellas?”
― Ovid, The Tristia of Ovid

“Philemon counselled with old Baucis first;
and then discovered to the listening Gods
their hearts' desire, ‘We pray you let us have
the care of your new temple; and since we
have passed so many years in harmony,
let us depart this life together— Let
the same hour take us both—I would not see
the tomb of my dear wife; and let me not
be destined to be buried by her hands!’
At once their wishes were fulfilled. So long
as life was granted they were known to be
the temple's trusted keepers, and when age
had enervated them with many years,
as they were standing, by some chance, before
the sacred steps, and were relating all
these things as they had happened, Baucis saw
Philemon, her old husband, and he, too,
saw Baucis, as their bodies put forth leaves;
and while the tops of trees grew over them,
above their faces, — they spoke each to each;
as long as they could speak they said, ‘Farewell,
farewell, my own’—and while they said farewell;
new leaves and branches covered both at once.”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses

“Ceza kaldırılabilir; ama suç insanın içinde sonsuza kadar yaşar.”
― Ovidius, Metamorphoses

“May the world near and far dread the sons of Aeneas, and if there be land that feared not Rome, may it love Rome instead.”
― Ovid

“Gifts Iphis promised when she was a maid
transformed into a boy he gladly paid.”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses

“Barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intelligor illis”
― Ovid

“...happy the spear that his hand grasped, she thought, / and happy the reins that lay within his grip.”
― Ovid

“The shade of Orpheus now fled below,
and recognized all he had seen before;
and as he searched through the Elysian Fields,
he came upon his lost Eurydice,
and passionately threw his arms about her;
here and now, they walk together, side by side,
or now he follows as she goes before,
or he precedes, and she goes after him;
and now there is no longer any danger
when Orpheus looks upon Eurydice.”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses

“Nothing persists without changing its outward appearance,
for Nature is always engaged in acts of renewal,
creating new forms everywhere out of the old ones;
nothing in all of the cosmos can perish, believe me,
but takes on a different shape; and what we call birth is
when something first changes out of its former condition,
and what we call death is when its identity ceases;
things may perhaps be translated hither and thither;
nevertheless, they stay constant in their sum total.”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses

“Innocence is no earthly weapon.”
― Geoffrey Hill, New and Collected Poems, 1952-1992

“But why do I linger over others' tales
of metamorphoses? Often, young friends,
I have myself turned into something else,
although my choices have been limited:
at times I seem to be as I am now,
at other times I coil into a snake,
and sometimes as the leader of the herd,
a bull with potent horns...”
― Ovid

“I may still win my bliss and end my pain,
and nothing to lose means only much to gain.”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses

“I should have checked which way the wind was blowing
before I set my sails out, to be safe;
I set them out too soon; a wind came up
and now I have been driven on the rocks;
the whole force of the ocean overwhelms me,
and I have no way to regain my course.”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses

“She starts and stops. Sets down -- and then condemns.
Adds and deletes. Doubts; finds fault with; approves.
She throws the tablet down, then picks it up!”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses

“Aelia, please stop worrying. You look beautiful. We've had large parties before and you haven't been nervous." There was the clink of cosmetic pots and bottles of nard used to perfume the forehead.
"I wasn't nervous until you mentioned Ovid would be coming," Aelia said.
Aelia was not alone in her love of Ovid's poetry. Passia had read every word the man had ever written. He was considered to be one of Rome's experts on both love and beauty, and most women I knew owned several of his books. When Passia heard he would be in attendance I thought she might swoon.
There was the ruffle of a scroll being unraveled. "Could this be one of the sources of your concern? Women's Facial Cosmetics?"
I remembered the book. Apicius had bought it and other Ovid titles for Aelia two years earlier as a Saturnalia gift.
"I know, I shouldn't worry. But if he didn't know so much, how could he write it down? It is as though he were the mouthpiece for Venus herself!”
― Crystal King, Feast of Sorrow

“I am the daughter of a mother who would never change...The refusal to modify her aspect, her habits, her attitudes was strategy for resisting American culture, for fighting it, for maintaining her identity...When my mother returns to Calcutta, she is proud of the fact that, in spite of almost fifty years away from India, she seems like a woman who never left.

I am the opposite. While the refusal to change was my mother's rebellion, the insistence on transforming myself is mine...All my life I've tried to get away from the void of my origin. It was the void that distressed me, that I was fleeing...Writing, I discovered a way of hiding in my characters, of escaping myself. Of undergoing one mutation after another.

One could say that the mechanisms of metamorphosis is the only element of life that never changes. The journey of every individual, every country, every historical epoch, of the entire universe and all it contains, is nothing but a series of changes, at times subtle, at times deep, without which we would stand still. The moments of transitions in which something changes, constitute the backbone of all of us. Whether they are a salvation or a loss, they are moments we tend to remember. They give a structure to our existence. Almost all the rest is oblivion.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, In Other Words

“I am of the temper of most kings, who love to be in debt, are all for present money, no matter how they pay it afterwards: besides, the nature of a preface is rambling, never wholly out of the way, nor in it. This I have learned from the practice of honest Montaigne, and return at my pleasure to Ovid and Chaucer, of whom I have little more to say.”
― John Dryden, Dryden

“There is a place at the centre of the World, between the zones of earth, sea, and sky, at the boundary of the three worlds. From here, whatever exists is seen, however far away, and every voice reaches listening ears. Rumour lives there, choosing a house for herself on a high mountain summit, adding innumerable entrances, a thousand openings, and no doors to bar the threshold. It is open night and day: and is all of sounding bronze. All rustles with noise, echoes voices, and repeats what is heard. There is no peace within: no silence anywhere. Yet there is no clamour, only the subdued murmur of voices, like the waves of the sea, if you hear them far off, or like the sound of distant thunder when Jupiter makes the dark clouds rumble.

Crowds fill the hallways: a fickle populace comes and goes, and, mingling truth randomly with fiction, a thousand rumours wander, and confused words circulate. Of these, some fill idle ears with chatter, others carry tales, and the author adds something new to what is heard. Here is Credulity: here is rash Error, empty Delight, and alarming Fear, sudden Sedition, and Murmurings of doubtful origin. Rumour herself sees everything that happens in the heavens, throughout the ocean, and on land, and inquires about everything on earth.”
― Ovid, Metamorfosis VII - XV