Idiom
festina lente
Literary Roman origin
Meaning
Make haste slowly — move quickly, but never faster than you can do it properly.
Examples
“Festina lente — quickly, but get it right.”
“Her advice to the new team was festina lente: two weeks of planning would save two months of repairs.”
“Festina lente is not a compromise between speed and care but a claim about which produces which, and every organisation that has rebuilt the same system twice has learned it the expensive way.”
Examples
simple
“Festina lente — quickly, but get it right.”
contextual
“Her advice to the new team was festina lente: two weeks of planning would save two months of repairs.”
complex
“Festina lente is not a compromise between speed and care but a claim about which produces which, and every organisation that has rebuilt the same system twice has learned it the expensive way.”
Origin
Suetonius says that Augustus thought nothing less becoming in a commander than haste and rashness, and that he was constantly quoting a Greek proverb — hurry slowly. Festina lente is the Latin of it, and it was the closest thing the first emperor had to a management philosophy: better to be sure than fast, because a battle refought is more expensive than a battle delayed.
The phrase acquired a set of emblems that carried it through the Renaissance. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer, took a dolphin coiled round an anchor as his device — speed wrapped around stability — and the Medici used a tortoise with a sail.
English uses festina lente wherever the two halves of the instruction are genuinely in tension: ship it, but do not ship it broken.
Stories
The Poets' Latin · See all Roman origin
Horace, Virgil and Cicero, still quoted in the original.
carpe diem — Seize the day — make use of today rather than counting on tomorrow.
tempus fugit — Time flies — said when far more of it has gone than you expected.
memento mori — A reminder that you are going to die, and that this should change how you spend the time.
in vino veritas — People say what they actually think once they have had a drink.
to err is human — Making mistakes is part of being a person, so a mistake alone is not a scandal.
homo homini lupus — Man is a wolf to man — people are dangerous to each other.
- Level
- C2 · Proficiency
- Updated