Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas

Dryden rendered it: "Happy the Man, who, studying Nature's Laws, / Thro' known Effects can trace the secret Cause" (The works of Virgil, 1697).

The full verse states:Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas Atque metus omnes, et inexorabile fatum Subjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avariWhich translates to:[3]He who’s been able to learn the causes of things is happy, and has set all fear, and unrelenting fate, and the noise

of greedy Acheron, under his feet.The latter half of the phrase, "rerum cognoscere causas", is the motto of the London School of Economics, the University of Sheffield, Bruce Hall (residential college of the Australian National University), Humberside Collegiate, the University of Guelph, Hill Park Secondary School in Hamilton, Ontario, the IVDI lecture hall of the University of Debrecen, the Science National Honor Society, the Royal Military College of Science,[4] the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel and the Romanian National Defense College [ro].

[5] The phrase is engraved in the stone bust of Clodomiro Picado Twight in the University of Costa Rica, in San Pedro and also engraved on a stone fireplace at the Henry Wallace building in the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE) in Turrialba, Costa Rica.

The sentence also appears in Latin in the English-language edition of Asterix and Obelix All at Sea on page 41.