Festina lente is Latin for "make haste slowly," a rendering of the Greek speude bradeos. The ancient biographer Suetonius records it as a favorite saying of the emperor Augustus, who held that a commander should act with urgency but never with recklessness. Erasmus gave it a long essay in his Adages in 1508, and the printer Aldus Manutius took the anchor and dolphin from a coin of the emperor Titus as his device, the anchor for steadiness and the dolphin for speed.

Renaissance emblem makers also drew the idea as a crab and a butterfly, two creatures that could hardly be more unlike. The butterfly stands for swift intention and the crab for patient, deliberate grip, and the point is that neither is enough alone. Haste without care spoils the work, while care without momentum never finishes it. The saying asks for both at once: move quickly toward the goal, and give every step the attention it deserves.