“Keep what you’ve got; the evil that we know is best. (translator Thornton)”
Habeus ut nactus ; nota mala res optima’st.
Trinummus, Act I, scene 2, lines 25
Trinummus (The Three Coins)
Act I, scene 3, line 42.
Variant translation: Things which you do not hope happen more frequently than things which you do hope. (translator unknown)
Mostellaria (The Haunted House)
“Keep what you’ve got; the evil that we know is best. (translator Thornton)”
Habeus ut nactus ; nota mala res optima’st.
Trinummus, Act I, scene 2, lines 25
Trinummus (The Three Coins)
“I love truth, and wish to have it always spoken to me : I hate a liar. (translated by Thornton)”
Ego verum amo, verum vol mihi dici : mendacem odi.
Mostellaria, Act I, scene 3, line 26
Mostellaria (The Haunted House)
“Man proposes, God disposes. (translated by Thornton)”
Sperat quidem animus : quo eveniat, diis in manu est
Bacchides Act I, scene 2, line 36.
Variant translation: The mind is hopeful : success is in God’s hands. (translator unknown)
Bacchides (The Bacchises)
“True instruction is this: —to learn to wish that each thing should come to pass as it does.”
Epictetus (50–138) philosopher from Ancient Greece
Golden Sayings of Epictetus
Context: True instruction is this: —to learn to wish that each thing should come to pass as it does. And how does it come to pass? As the Disposer has disposed it. Now He has disposed that there should be summer and winter, and plenty and dearth, and vice and virtue, and all such opposites, for the harmony of the whole. (26).
Marguerite Yourcenar book A Coin in Nine Hands
Le malheur est que, parfois, des souhaits s'accomplissent, afin que se perpétue le supplice de l'espérance.
Denier du rêve (1934), translated as A Coin in Nine Hands (1994) by Dori Katz, Ch. 3, p. 31 ISBN 0-226-96527-9
“Very often the things we most desire come only after much patience and struggle.”
Richelle Mead (1976) American writer
Source: Succubus Blues