Life & Wisdom Quote by Ovid

Ovid opens with a flex disguised as a confession: the work ahead is hard, and that difficulty is the point. “I attempt an arduous task” sounds like modesty, but it’s also stage-setting, a poet clearing his throat before the high-wire act. The second clause tightens into a creed: value isn’t inherent; it’s manufactured through strain. That’s not just personal motivation, it’s an aesthetic argument about why art deserves attention at all.

The line works because it reverses the usual logic of accomplishment. Instead of “hard things are worth doing,” Ovid implies “only hard things are worth anything.” It’s a rhetorical narrowing that flatters the audience, too: if you’re reading him, you’re the kind of person who can appreciate difficulty. Embedded in that is a defense of craft. Ovid, famed for polish, speed, and formal control, insists that elegance isn’t effortlessness; it’s effort made invisible.

Context matters: Roman literary culture prized virtus, ambition, and competitive excellence; poets wrote under the pressure of predecessors and patrons, with reputations built on innovation within strict forms. Ovid is signaling that he’s not dabbling - he’s entering the arena. There’s also a quieter anxiety: if the poem needs a justification, it’s because pleasure alone may not seem respectable. So he sanctifies pleasure by attaching it to labor. The subtext is almost modern: don’t trust the “natural talent” myth; trust the grind, then call the result art.