The story
Seneca was a Roman philosopher who wrote 124 letters of advice to a younger friend, Lucilius, late in his life. In one of them, Letter 45, Lucilius has a complaint: there are hardly any books where he lives.
Seneca isn’t worried. In Latin he writes, “Non refert quam multos sed quam bonos habeas”: it doesn’t matter how many you have, but how good they are. A well-chosen shelf, he adds, does you good, while a scattered pile is only for fun.
A well-known English translation put it in words we would recognize: “But it is quality, rather than quantity, that matters.”
English speakers had found the same pairing on their own. A verse from 1604 tells readers that the wisest minds “The qualitie, not quantitie, respect.” The two rhyming words have been paired ever since, and today’s short form, quality over quantity, is the one people say.
