Rome wasn't built in a day
"Rome wasn't built in a day" is an adage attesting to the need for time to create great things. It is the usual English translation of a medieval French phrase, , from the collection , published around 1190. The modern French form is «». The expression, (as "Rome was not built in one day") is given in English in John Heywood's "A Dialogue Conteinyng the Nomber in Effect of all the Prouerbes in the Englishe Tongue" (c. 1538), while Queen Elizabeth I referred to the idea in Latin in an address at Cambridge in  1563. The present perfect and "oratio recta" version of the Latin saying—the version one would use for a stand-alone quotation—would be "Roma uno die non est condita". The phrase was used in the title of a 1964 song Sam Cooke also covered by British singer Anne Shelton in 1962.