About Adagia

What we do

Adagia gathers quotations, sayings and proverbs and arranges them by theme — from love and friendship to time, courage and philosophy. Each theme carries an introduction explaining where the idea comes from and how different traditions have approached it, and the most represented authors carry a short note on who they were and what they wrote.

The aim is not to collect as many sentences as possible but to arrange them so they can be read with context. A line lifted from a letter of Seneca's means something different once you know it was written by a man whose emperor eventually ordered him to take his own life.

How content is chosen

Quotes are reviewed by hand before publication. We favour those whose author can be established with reasonable confidence and avoid the ones the internet routinely attributes to the wrong people, which is a common problem in this genre. Proverbs are labelled as such, since they have no individual author.

The three-language versions are not the same text pushed through a translator. A saying that works in one language often loses its point in another, and in those cases we look for the equivalent rather than the literal rendering.

How it is funded

The app is free and shows ads. Anyone who would rather not see them can remove them permanently with a one-time purchase — no subscription and no renewals. Every quote, theme, collection and font stays available to everyone, with or without that purchase.

Signing in syncs favorites and collections across devices. It is not required; the app works as a guest, and in that case we ask for neither a name nor an email address.

Corrections

If you find a misattributed quote, a translation error or an inaccuracy in an author note, tell us. Those reports are handled ahead of everything else.