Catullus Quotes

Difficile est longum subito deponere amorem.

You ask how many kissings of you, Lesbia, are enough for me and more than enough?

Siqua recordanti benefacta priora voluptas
Est homini.

Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus
rumoresque senum severiorum
omnes unius aestimemus assis
soles occidere et redire possunt:
nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,
nox est perpetua una dormienda.

Quid datur a divis felici optatius hora?

What he himself is, whether he is or is not, he does not know so much as this.

Nam risu inepto res ineptior nulla est.

If anything ever happened to any one who eagerly longed and never hoped, that is a true pleasure to the mind.

Leave off wishing to deserve any thanks from anyone, or thinking that anyone can ever become grateful.

Wandering through many countries and over many seas I come, my brother, to these sorrowful obsequies, to present you with the last guerdon of death, and speak, though in vain, to your silent ashes, since fortune has taken your own self away from me—alas, my brother, so cruelly torn from me! Yet now meanwhile take these offerings, which by the custom of our fathers have been handed down—a sorrowful tribute—for a funeral sacrifice; take them, wet with many tears of a brother, and for ever, my brother, hail and farewell!

Ah, what is more blessed than to put cares away, when the mind lays by its burden, and tired with labour of far travel we have come to our own home and rest on the couch we longed for? This it is which alone is worth all these toils.

Si quicquam cupido optantique optigit umquam
insperanti, hoc est gratum animo proprie.

Ipse qui sit, utrum sit an non sit, id quoque nescit.

Let us live, my Lesbia, and love, and value at one farthing all the talk of crabbed old men. Suns may set and rise again. For us, when the short light has once set, remains to be slept the sleep of one unbroken night.

Mourn, ye Graces and Loves, and all you whom the Graces love. My lady's sparrow is dead, the sparrow my lady's pet, whom she loved more than her own eyes.