Herodotus Quotes
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Before a man dies, hold back and call him not happy but lucky.
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When life is so burdensome death has become a sought after refuge.
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In peace children inter their parents, war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.
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The Persians are very fond of wine ... It is also their general practice to deliberate upon affairs of weight when they are drunk; and then in the morning, when they are sober, the decision to which they came the night before is put before them by the master of the house in which it was made; and if it is then approved they act on it; if not, they set it aside. Sometimes, however, they are sober at their first deliberations, but in this case they always reconsider the matter under the influence of wine.
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The ears of men are lesser agents of belief than their eyes.
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It is said that as many days as there are in the whole journey, so many are the men and horses that stand along the road, each horse and man at the interval of a days journey; and these are stayed neither by snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness from accomplishing their appointed course with all speed.
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They the Persians are accustomed to deliberate on matters of the highest moment when warm with wine; but whatever they in this situation may determine is again proposed to them on the morrow, in their cooler moments, by the person in whose house they had before assembled. If at this time also it meet their approbation, it is executed; otherwise it is rejected. Whatever also they discuss when sober, is always a second time examined after they have been drinking.
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But this I know: if all mankind were to take their troubles to market with the idea of exchanging them, anyone seeing what his neighbor's troubles were like would be glad to go home with his own.
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It is sound planning that invariably earns us the outcome we want; without it, even the gods are unlikely to look with favour on our designs.
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Tell Greece that her spring has been taken out of her year.
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My men have become women, but the women men.
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Of all possessions a friend is the most precious.
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Where wisdom is called for, force is of little use.
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Good masters generally have bad slaves, and bad slaves have good masters.
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It is the greatest and the tallest of trees that the gods bring low with bolts and thunder. For the gods love to thwart whatever is greater than the rest. They do not suffer pride in anyone but themselves.
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Let there be nothing untried; for nothing happens by itself, but men obtain all things by trying.
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I never yet feared those men who set a place apart in the middle of their cities where they gather to cheat one another and swear oaths which they break.
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The man who has planned badly, if fortune is on his side, may have had a stroke of luck; but his plan was a bad one nonetheless.
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It is clear that not in one thing alone, but in many ways equality and freedom of speech are a good thing.
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The worst part a man can suffer is to have insight into much and power over nothing.
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As the old saw says well: every end does not appear together with its beginning.
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This king Sesostris divided the land among all Egyptians so as to give each one a quadrangle of equal size and to draw from each his revenues, by imposing a tax to be levied yearly. But everyone from whose part the river tore anything away, had to go to him to notify what had happened; he then sent overseers who had to measure out how much the land had become smaller, in order that the owner might pay on what was left, in proportion to the entire tax imposed. In this way, it appears to me, geometry originated, which passed thence to Hellas.
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The wooden wall alone should remain unconquered.
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A general curiosity about the unknown sparked by the multicultural milieu in which I spent my formative years. There was a lot of unknown back then, too. I dare say it was easier to be an explorer then.