Quotes from Gaius Valerius Catullus

Ille mi par esse deo videtur ille, si fas est, superare divos, qui sedens adversus identitem te spectat et audit dulce ridentem, misero quod omnis eripit sensus mihi: nam simul te, Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus flamma demanat, sonitu suopte tintinant aures gemina, teguntur lumina nocte. otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est; otio exsultas nimiumque gestis; otium et reges prius et beatas perdidit urbes.

It is difficult suddenly to lay aside a long-cherished love.

May it live and last for more than one century.

But you shall not escape my iambics.

What a woman says to her ardent lover should be written in wind and running water.

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.

I hate and I love. Why I do so, perhaps you ask. I know not, but I feel it and I am in torment.

To whom am I to present my pretty new book, freshly smoothed off with dry pumice stone? To you, Cornelius: for you used to think that my trifles were worth something, long ago.

There is nothing more silly than a silly laugh.

Ah, what is more blessed than to put cares away!

Whatever it is, wherever he is, whatever he is doing, he smiles: it is a malady he has, neither an elegant one as I think, nor in good taste.

What is given by the gods more desirable than the fortunate hour?

And forever, O my brother, hail and farewell!

Mourn, ye Graces and Loves, and all you whom the Graces love. My lady's sparrow is dead, the sparrow, my lady's pet.

I would see a little Torquatus, stretching his baby hands from his mother's lap, smile a sweet smile at his father with lips half parted.

What an eloquent manikin!

He seems to me to be equal to a god, he, if it may be, seems to surpass the very gods, who sitting opposite you again gazes at you and hears you sweetly laughing.

Let us live and love, my Lesbia, and value at a penny all the talk of crabbed old men. Suns may set and rise again: for us, when our brief light has set, there's the sleep of perpetual night. Give me a thousand kisses.

Catullus, the worst of all poets, gives you [Marcus Tullius] his warmest thanks; he being as much the worst of all poets as you are the best of all patrons.

But these things are past and gone.

And let her not look to find my love, as before; my love, which by her fault has dropped like a flower on the meadow's edge, when it has been touched by the plow passing by.

O ye gods, grant me this in return for my piety.

It is not fit that men should be compared with gods.