Life & Wisdom Quote by Ovid

Self-awareness is cheap; repair is costly. Ovid’s line snaps like a taut couplet because it refuses the comforting modern fantasy that naming a problem is halfway to solving it. “To feel our ills” covers the entire repertoire of human diagnosis: confession, complaint, even the pleasurable melancholy of knowing exactly what’s wrong. The second clause lands as the cold corrective. “To cure them” demands technique, discipline, time, and usually help from outside the self. The structure is a moral pivot: one thing is interior and immediate, the other is external and arduous.

Ovid is writing as a poet of appetite and consequence, a Roman master of turning private desire into public drama. In his world, “ills” aren’t just illnesses; they’re also vices, passions, and entanglements that behave like symptoms. Roman culture prized self-command, but also staged spectacular failures of it. The subtext reads like a warning to anyone who thinks insight equals virtue: you can recognize your weakness and still be ruled by it.

There’s irony in how gently he phrases an unforgiving truth. “One thing...another” sounds almost conversational, as if he’s shrugging. That rhetorical softness is the bait. It invites agreement before it indicts the listener’s inertia. The intent isn’t to scold feeling; it’s to demote it. Pain can be accurate, even eloquent, without being transformative. Ovid’s point is not that awareness is useless, but that it’s the easiest part of the story - and the part we most like to mistake for an ending.