I feel as if I've at last tracked down the origin of my favorite saying by my father, "Too soon old, too late smart."
From Mantel, p. 321
Sometimes Henry says to him, ‘Still at the antique letters, Lord Cromwell? What did you learn today?’
He says, ‘I learned that ars longa, vita brevis: I learned how to say it in Greek.’
‘That is Hippocrates,’ Henry says. ‘He tells us, life is short and our task so great that we will die before we can . . .’
The king breaks off. It is an offence for his subjects to speculate about his death or predict it, but it is not an offence for him to speak of it himself; yet he looks chary, as if he thinks it should be. ' "Life is short and art is long, the opportunity sudden and fleeting: experiment dangerous, judgement difficult." I think I have the sense of it.’
He bows. ‘I am the better instructed, sir.’
Daily, daily, one must practise the courtier’s art, and nightly, the art of governance: and never get it right. Chaucer says it in our own English tongue. ‘The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.’I was embarrassed that I hadn't realized that it all goes back to "ars longa, vita brevis." Hippocrates's original is wonderful.
