Quotes

• Festina lente.
  • Make haste slowly.
  • Attributed to Augustus by Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, "Divus Augustus", sect. 25

• Ther nis no werkman, whatsoevere he be,
  That may bothe werke wel and hastily.
  • Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, "The Merchant's Tale"

• Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.
  • Max Ehrmann, "Desiderata" (1927)

• The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is on the contrary born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life. When we do not do the one thing that we ought to do, we have no time for anything else—we are the busiest people in the world.
  • Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition (1973), § 156

• Though I am always in haste, I am never in a hurry.
  • John Wesley (1703–1791). Letter to a member of the Society, 10th December 1777, Select Letters (1837)

Unsourced

• No two things differ more than hurry and despatch. Hurry is the mark of a weak mind, despatch of a strong one. A weak man in office, like a squirrel in a cage, is laboring eternally, but to no purpose, and in constant motion without getting on a jot; like a turnstile, he is in everybody's way, but stops nobody; he talks a great deal, but says very little; looks into everything, but sees into nothing; and has a hundred irons in the fire, but very few of them are hot, and with those few that are he only burns his fingers.
  • Colton

Anonymous

• Haste makes waste.
  • English proverb. Reported in John Heywood, Dialogue of Proverbs (1546), part 1, ch. 2