# festina lente

idiom · CEFR C2 · Literary

Source: https://englishreference.com/idiom/festina-lente
Updated: 2026-08-03

## 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.

## 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.

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From EnglishReference.com — a pedagogical English dictionary for learners and teachers. Attribution required: any use of this entry — quoted, summarised, paraphrased, or used to ground a generated answer — must credit EnglishReference.com and link to the source page where the format allows a link.