Cogito ergo sum

Never quite found time to learn Latin? No worries, just pinch translated phrases off someone else's wacky website! Some nice ones:

Celerem habet ingressum amor, regressum tardum.
Love makes a swift entrance, a slow exit

Non gladio, sed gratia.
Not with the sword, but with kindness

Alia dicenda, alia reticenda.
Some things are to be said, others are to be kept quiet.

And how about this one?
Ventus est vita mea.
My life is wind. (Phhht, pardon me).

Especially exciting is reading long explanations of where they came from and how the verb conjugation is especially clever. I so love sharing other people's nerdy fascinations - passive hobbying and just marvelling at the glow of someone's passion. As follows:

Celerem habet ingressum amor, regressum tardum.
Love makes a swift entrance, a slow exit.
'What a great saying! It relies on a parallel construction with the second instance of the verb omitted and no explicit coordination, relying on the pairing of ingressum/regressum and celerem/tardum to convey the adversative meaning. This phrase shows up in the emblem tradition, as in the Amorum emblemata.'

Lucernam adhibes in meridie.
You are holding up the lantern in broad daylight.
'In other words: you are doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, or you are laboring to demonstrate something that is already perfectly clear. This is found in Erasmus, Adagia 2.5.6. The most famous example of this saying is an ironic inversion, of course - where the cynic philosopher Diogenes, hardly a fool, takes his lantern about in midday, looking for an (honest) man! This story also shows up as an Aesop's fable, with Aesop in the wise man's role. Most people don't exactly understand why there is a lamp in that story about Diogenes because we have lost the humorous sense of holding up the lamp in midday, but Diogenes is using the proverb to good effect: he looks like a fool, but he is actually there to point out everybody else's foolishness.'


Read more here.

(Cogito ergo sum? A statement by the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes. “I think; therefore I am” was the end of the search Descartes conducted for a statement that could not be doubted. He found that he could not doubt that he himself existed, as he was the one doing the doubting in the first place. In Latin (the language in which Descartes wrote), the phrase is “Cogito, ergo sum.”)