“Non est ad astra mollis e terris via.”
In the middle of something hard that's worth it.
This line comes on
About this line
Seneca gave this line to Megara — Hercules’ wife — in his tragedy, as an observation about the cost of any great undertaking. He couldn’t have known what “the stars” would eventually mean. He didn’t need to. The cost of any great undertaking is the same in every century.
Why we carry this line
This is my line. I watch SpaceX rockets leave the atmosphere in real time, and Seneca called it two thousand years ago — there’s no easy way to the stars. I wanted the whole sentence, not the bumper-sticker half everyone prints.
The design
This one breaks the Seneca set's all-capitals rule on purpose. The small connecting words, there is and from the earth, stay lowercase. NO EASY WAY and TO THE STARS carry the weight in capitals. Beneath it is the full Latin line, non est ad astra mollis e terris via, with ad astra set bold: the two words the famous motto later borrowed.
What happened next
Another Latin line says the same thing in four words: Ad astra per aspera. On May 25, 1861, Kansas put it on its state seal.
On January 27, 1967, a fire during a test on the launch pad killed the three astronauts of Apollo 1. A plaque now stands at that pad, Launch Complex 34 at Cape Canaveral, Florida: “Ad astra per aspera (a rough road leads to the stars).”
The plaque ends: “Remember them not for how they died but for those ideals for which they lived.”
Documented source
Every quote here is traced to a documented source. How we verify →