Latin Literature Quotes

I much preferred Latin to Greek. I loved the language being such a pattern that you could not shift a word without the whole sentence falling to pieces.

I think Latin has some logic to it and there was a discipline.

In my stunted career as a scholar, I'd read promissory notes, papal bulls and guidelines for Inquisitorial interrogation. Dante, too. Boccaccio... But after 1400? Nihil.

I originally went to Edinburgh for Latin, which I love and the literature is incredible, but then I suddenly realised that languages are so crucial for working in the fashion industry and it is wonderful when you can communicate with everyone.

Novelas are very respected in the Latin world.

When I was very young I was reading a lot of Latin American fiction, which later would be called "boom fiction."

When I was teaching Latin in girls' schools before I became a writer, I didn't much like it if parents would come in and say, 'We'll have less of the Ovid and Virgil and more of the grammar, please.' After all, I was the one in charge. That's how I feel about doctors. You should trust them to do their job properly.

In the modern languages there was not, six hundred years ago, a single volume which is now read. The library of our profound scholar must have consisted entirely of Latin books.

They do not know very good Latin, these botanists.

The standard chunk of Lorem Ipsum used since the 1500s is reproduced below for those interested. Sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 from "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" by Cicero are also reproduced in their exact original form, accompanied by English versions from the 1914 translation by H. Rackham.

Older boys were allowed to beat younger ones at my 15th-century English boarding school, and every boy had to run a five-mile annual steeplechase through the sludge and rain of an October day, as horses do. We wrote poems in dead languages and recited the Lord's Prayer in Latin every Sunday night.

Well, I'm trained as a classicist, so I like to read the Greeks and Romans.

I studied Latin in high school, and I was reading stuff from Cicero. And that signal took a few thousand years to get to me. But I was still interested in what he had to say.

My father made me take three years of Latin in high school.

In the usual course of study I had come to a book of a certain Cicero.

Latin is an international language.

I'm part Latin, so everything in the Latin culture is - there's a lot of hyperbole, and there's a lot of melodrama.

Of poets I put Virgil first - he was greatest.

I've got some gift for languages. You follow your gift. But Latin's not easy.