This is a real, traceable sentence: it is the opening aphorism of the Aphorisms, one of the treatises of the Hippocratic Corpus. But this exact English is the wording carried by the standard online texts — Wikisource ↗ and the Internet Classics Archive — which credit Francis Adams’s ↗ 1849 translation even though his printed 1849 volume reads “Life is short, and the Art long; the occasion fleeting; experience fallacious, and judgment difficult.” And the byline itself cannot be verified: none of the texts in the Corpus ↗ is proven to be by Hippocrates himself.
“Life is short, and Art long; the crisis fleeting; experience perilous, and decision difficult” Hippocrates, Aphorisms, sec. I, aph. 1; English text credited to Francis Adams, as carried by the Internet Classics Archive. Traditionally attributed: no work in the Hippocratic Corpus is proven to be by Hippocrates himself, and this popular wording is not Adams's printed 1849 text, which reads "the occasion fleeting; experience fallacious, and judgment difficult."
Can you use it?
✓ Free to use, including in commercial and paid presentations — no permission or licence needed.
Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool
In context
Evoking the world of Hippocrates — Greek physician of Kos, the “Father of Medicine”. Theme: "Life is short, and Art long; the crisis fleeting; experience perilous, and decision difficult". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Life is short, and Art long; the crisis fleeting; experience perilous, and decision difficult". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
Aphorisms, Section I, aphorism 1
Work
Aphorisms (Hippocratic Corpus), Section I, aphorism 1
Composed
Most of the Hippocratic Corpus dates from the late 5th to the first half of the 4th century BC
Translation
English text as carried by Wikisource and the Internet Classics Archive, credited to Francis Adams (1796–1861) — but his printed The Genuine Works of Hippocrates, vol. 2 (London: Sydenham Society, 1849), p. 697, reads differently at I.1
Authorship
Traditional. No text in the Corpus is proven to be by Hippocrates himself
Life is short, and Art long; the crisis fleeting; experience perilous, and decision difficult. The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants, and externals cooperate.
Aphorisms I.1
The second sentence is almost always dropped, and it is the one that fixes the meaning: this is a rule for practising physicians, not a reflection on art and mortality. Note also that this is the online-text wording: Adams’s printed 1849 volume reads “Life is short, and the Art long; the occasion fleeting; experience fallacious, and judgment difficult.”
The wording checks out against the standard English text. The Internet Classics Archive’s Aphorisms, Section I ↗ opens with the sentence verbatim, and the title page for the text ↗ credits it as “Aphorisms · By Hippocrates · Written 400 B.C.E · Translated by Francis Adams.” That translator credit, though, is not borne out by Adams’s own printed volume — see below.
Wikiquote ↗ carries the line in its sourced Aphorisms section at 1:1 — not among the disputed entries — alongside the Greek, Ὁ βίος βραχὺς, ἡ δὲ τέχνη μακρὴ, ὁ δὲ καιρὸς ὀξὺς, ἡ δὲ πεῖρα σφαλερὴ, ἡ δὲ κρίσις χαλεπή, and a variant English translation. Quote Investigator has no article on this quotation.
The 1849 print does not match the wording on this page. The Internet Archive’s scan ↗ of The Genuine Works of Hippocrates, vol. 2 records Francis Adams (1796–1861) as translator, printed for the Sydenham Society, London, 1849 — and sets Aphorism I.1, on p. 697, as “Life is short, and the Art long; the occasion fleeting; experience fallacious, and judgment difficult.” Adams’s own footnote on that page glosses “The occasion is fleeting,” so the reading is not a scanning artefact, and Wikisource’s aphorism 2 matches the print verbatim — the substitution is at I.1 alone. The scan therefore fixes the work, the translator and the date; it does not support this page’s wording.
The one thing that cannot be verified is the byline. Wikipedia’s survey of the Hippocratic Corpus ↗ states flatly that “of the texts in the corpus, none is proven to be by Hippocrates himself,” and notes that Franz Zacharias Ermerins identified at least nineteen authorial hands in the collection.
✓Public domain
The Greek text dates from antiquity and has been out of copyright for centuries. The English quoted here is a nineteenth-century rendering in the Francis Adams tradition — Wikisource carries it as public domain, published well before 1931, and Adams himself died in 1861 — so it is public domain in the United States as well. Note that this applies to this rendering only: a modern translation of the same aphorism, such as a recent Loeb Classical Library volume, would be separately in copyright.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What people get wrong about it
Nothing here is a fabrication — the sentence is genuinely the first line of the Aphorisms. But almost every part of how it gets quoted is off by one step: the words are not quite the Victorian translator’s they are credited to, the “art” is not art, the author is a collective, and one of the most-quoted versions is a different poet’s line entirely.
~
The English wordingCredited to Francis Adams — but not his printed text translation
The English you are quoting circulates under Adams’s name in every standard online text, but it is not what he printed. His 1849 volume, at p. 697 ↗, reads “Life is short, and the Art long; the occasion fleeting; experience fallacious, and judgment difficult” — four differences from the popular line — and his own footnote there glosses “The occasion is fleeting.” The Greek reads Ὁ βίος βραχὺς, ἡ δὲ τέχνη μακρὴ, ὁ δὲ καιρὸς ὀξὺς…, and Adams was a Scottish physician who practised in Banchory, Aberdeenshire ↗ and translated Greek medical texts on the side. Wikiquote records a third rendering again: “Art is long; life is short; opportunity is fleeting; judgement is difficult; experience is deceitful.”
~
The word “Art”Greek τέχνη — craft, not fine art misread
The look-alike lineHenry Wadsworth Longfellow different poem
“Art is long, and Time is fleeting, / And our hearts, though stout and brave, / Still, like muffled drums, are beating / Funeral marches to the grave” is Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life,” first published in 1838 ↗. It echoes the aphorism, but it is Longfellow’s own English and easy to mistake for the Hippocratic line.
✓The sentence really is the first line of the Hippocratic Aphorisms, and it has carried Hippocrates’s name since antiquity — but the English you are quoting is a variant circulating under Francis Adams’s name, not the wording he printed in 1849 ↗, the “Art” is medicine, and no text in the Corpus has ever been proven to be Hippocrates’s own work.
Context
Why this line has travelled so far
Read the whole aphorism and the meaning snaps into focus. The sentence does not stop at “decision difficult” — it continues: “The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants, and externals cooperate.” This is not a meditation on mortality or on the permanence of art. It is a working doctor’s warning, set at the head of a manual of clinical rules: the craft takes longer to master than you have, the moment to act passes quickly, the evidence of experience misleads, and you will still have to decide.
The line then acquired a second life in translation. It is best known in Latin as Ars longa, vita brevis — art first, life second, which inverts the Greek, where life comes first. Geoffrey Chaucer opened the Parlement of Foules in the 1380s with “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne ↗,” still using “craft” for the Greek τέχνη. By the time Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote “Art is long, and Time is fleeting ↗” in 1838, “art” had drifted toward the modern aesthetic sense, and the aphorism had quietly become a poem about legacy.
“Art” here means medicine. The craft takes longer to learn than a life takes to spend.
Why the Latin reads backwards — and why it matters
The inversion is not merely cosmetic. Hippocrates’s clause order makes the brevity of a life the premise and the length of the craft the problem that follows from it. Put art first and the sentence starts to sound like a claim about art outlasting the artist — which is roughly the meaning most people now attach to it, and roughly the opposite of a clinical caution about how little time a physician has to get good.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
c. 460 – c. 370 BC · Greek physician of Kos, the “Father of Medicine”
Hippocrates was born on the Aegean island of Kos around 460 BC and is traditionally called the Father of Medicine for separating medical practice from superstition and priestcraft. The catch is that almost nothing about him is firm: Wikipedia’s survey notes that “very little is known concretely about what Hippocrates himself thought, wrote and did, because his achievements were often conflated with those of the practitioners of Hippocratic medicine and the writers of the Hippocratic Corpus.” The roughly sixty treatises that bear his name were written by many hands — one nineteenth-century scholar counted at least nineteen — and whether Hippocrates wrote any of them has never been conclusively settled.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Hippocrates. “Aphorisms,” sec. I, aph. 1. English text credited to Francis Adams, as carried by the Internet Classics Archive, http://classics.mit.edu/Hippocrates/aphorisms.1.i.html. Adams’s printed translation — The Genuine Works of Hippocrates, vol. 2 (London: Printed for the Sydenham Society, 1849), p. 697 — reads “the occasion fleeting; experience fallacious, and judgment difficult.”
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Life is short, and Art long; the crisis fleeting; experience perilous, and decision difficult’?” Last verified 24 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/life-is-short-and-art-long-the-crisis-fleeting-experience/