Room 0019 — permanent collection

Short

Q: What is a good short quote for a tattoo?

“This too shall pass” and per aspera ad astra are the two most used, and both survive the compression well. If you want one with a traceable author, Virgil’s “fortune favours the bold” has a line number — Aeneid X.284.

These are the shortest lines in the museum. Brevity is not a style here — most of them are short because they have been worn down by two thousand years of repetition.

Forged for this room · every print in the Studio below is one of a kind

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“This too shall pass.”

Persian proverb
What it means. Four words that work in both directions, which is what makes them durable. It is a consolation in bad times and a warning in good ones, and it declines to say which you are currently in.

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“Per aspera ad astra.”

Latin proverb
What it means. The preposition is the whole sentence. Not past hardship or despite it — through, meaning the difficulty is the route rather than an obstruction on it.

“Through hardships to the stars”

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“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”

Lao Tzu
What it means. Usually read as encouragement, and it is closer to a description of scale. A thousand miles is not a real quantity to a body; one step is, and it is the only unit ever actually available.

Tao Te Ching, ch. 64

As published the line reads: “A journey of a thousand [miles] starts with a single step.” The version in circulation, and the one shown here, has drifted from it.

HI हजार मील की यात्रा एक कदम से शुरू होती है।ZH 千里之行，始于足下。

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“I think, therefore I am.”

René Descartes
What it means. The one thing Descartes could not doubt, arrived at by doubting everything else. Whatever is doing the doubting must exist in order to be doing it.

Discourse on the Method, 1637

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“Energy and persistence conquer all things.”

Attributed to Benjamin Franklin
What it means. Two qualities and no mention of talent, which is characteristic of Franklin. Both are inputs anyone can supply, which is either encouraging or uncomfortable depending on the day.

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“To live is the rarest thing in the world.”

Oscar Wilde
What it means. The full line adds “most people exist, that is all.” Wilde is separating two things that are indistinguishable from outside and completely different from inside.

The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)

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“Stay hungry, stay foolish.”

Steve Jobs
What it means. Jobs was quoting the back cover of the final Whole Earth Catalog. Both halves are warnings against arrival: hunger prevents satisfaction, foolishness prevents the caution that comes with expertise.

Stanford commencement address, 2005

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“The highest goodness is like water.”

Lao Tzu
What it means. Water benefits everything and competes with nothing, and settles in the low places people avoid. Six words carrying an entire ethics, which is why it has survived two and a half thousand years of compression.

Tao Te Ching, ch. 8

HI सर्वोच्च भलाई जल के समान है।ZH 上善若水。

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“Wherever you go, go with all your heart.”

Attributed to Confucius
What it means. The instruction is about manner rather than destination. It quietly rules out the most common way of living — being somewhere while withholding most of yourself from it.

HI जहाँ भी जाओ, पूरे हृदय से जाओ।ZH 无论去往何处，都要全心全意。

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“Dripping water can pierce through stone.”

Chinese proverb
What it means. The same finding as Ovid’s line elsewhere in this museum, arrived at independently on the other side of the world. Two civilisations watched water beat rock and drew the identical conclusion.

HI टपकता हुआ पानी पत्थर को भी भेद सकता है।ZH 滴水穿石。

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“Know thyself.”

Inscribed at Delphi
What it means. Two words that lasted because they are an instruction with no method attached. Every school that adopted it supplied its own.

Recorded by Pausanias, Description of Greece X.24

Assigned at various times to Socrates, Thales, Chilon and Pythagoras. It was on the temple before any of them.

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“Hope is a waking dream.”

Attributed to Aristotle
What it means. Hope is filed with dreaming rather than with planning — vivid, involuntary, and not evidence.

Reported by Diogenes Laërtius as something Aristotle said, rather than a line found in anything Aristotle wrote.

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“Veni, vidi, vici.”

Julius Caesar
What it means. Three words, three verbs, no adjectives. The brevity is the boast: the campaign is reported as if it took no longer to do than to say.

Reported by Suetonius, Divus Iulius 37 — “I came, I saw, I conquered”

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“Amor fati.”

Friedrich Nietzsche
What it means. Two words asking for more than acceptance. Nietzsche’s test is not enduring what happened but wanting it, which is a far harder thing to mean.

Ecce Homo, 1888 — “love of fate”

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“Memento mori.”

Latin phrase
What it means. Two words used for two thousand years as a corrective to whatever the reader currently thinks is urgent.

“Remember that you will die”

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“Festina lente.”

Attributed to Augustus
What it means. A contradiction held on purpose. The emperor is reported to have used it as a standing order about the pace of decisions.

Reported by Suetonius, Divus Augustus 25 — “make haste slowly”

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“Less is more.”

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
What it means. Three words that became the argument for most of twentieth-century design, borrowed from a poem about a painter who could not stop being competent.

Adopted as his maxim from Robert Browning's “Andrea del Sarto”, 1855

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“Carpe diem.”

Horace
What it means. Usually translated as seize the day; the verb is agricultural and closer to pluck. Horace's line ends by trusting tomorrow as little as possible, which the two-word version leaves out.

Odes I.11, 23 BC

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The Studio — take one home

Make it yours

Pick a line from this room — or write your own words — then choose a design, a palette, and how the type should sit. Drag the print to turn it. Every piece carries a seed: the same seed always forges the same art, so “Copy link” sends someone your exact print.

The words

A line from this room …or write your own

Show who said it

Design

Colour

Type & layout

Typeface Size Align Position

Text size Margin Text backing

Texture

Density Turbulence Grain Vignette

Take it away

Seed the same seed always forges the same print

Your shelf

Nothing kept yet — press “Keep it” and prints you like are saved on this device.

Short is usually old

Six of the ten lines here are more than three centuries old and four are more than two thousand. That is not a coincidence. A sentence gets shorter every time it is repeated by someone who half-remembers it, and the ones that survive the process are the ones that still work after everything removable has been removed. “This too shall pass” has been through more hands than anything else in the museum, which is why there is nothing left in it that could be cut.

The shortest lines are the best documented in the building

Thirteen of these eighteen carry an exact citation, the highest proportion in this world, and they are also the shortest lines in it — two of them are two words long. That inversion is not a coincidence. A line survives at four words only by being repeated for centuries, and anything repeated for centuries has been written down often enough to be traced. Length and evidence run in opposite directions here: the briefer the line, the more certain we are about it.

What is a good short quote for a tattoo?

“This too shall pass” and per aspera ad astra are the two most used, and both survive the compression well. If you want one with a traceable author, Virgil’s “fortune favours the bold” has a line number — Aeneid X.284.

Is “fortune favours the bold” a Latin proverb?

It is printed that way almost everywhere, but it is not anonymous. It is Virgil, Aeneid Book X, line 284 — audentis Fortuna iuvat.

What is the full version of “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”?

As published the line reads: “A journey of a thousand [miles] starts with a single step.” The version in circulation, and the one shown here, has drifted from it. The collection cites it to Tao Te Ching, ch. 64.

Did Aristotle say “Hope is a waking dream.”?

Reported by Diogenes Laërtius as something Aristotle said, rather than a line found in anything Aristotle wrote. It is filed here as attributed to Aristotle, which means widely credited and not traced to a primary source.

Who said “Know thyself.”?

Assigned at various times to Socrates, Thales, Chilon and Pythagoras. It was on the temple before any of them. The collection cites it to Recorded by Pausanias, Description of Greece X.24.