Herodotus Quotes
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As the old saw says well: every end does not appear together with its beginning.
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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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Good masters generally have bad slaves, and bad slaves have good masters.
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Before a man dies, hold back and call him not happy but lucky.
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My men have become women, but the women men.
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Tell Greece that her spring has been taken out of her year.
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Great things are won by great dangers.
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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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Call no man happy before he dies.
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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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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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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.
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The secret of success is that it is not the absence of failure, but the absence of envy.
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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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The most hateful grief of all human griefs is to have knowledge of a truth, but no power over the event.
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Where wisdom is called for, force is of little use.
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The trials of living and the pangs of disease make even the short span of life too long.
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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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The Lacedaemonians fought a memorable battle; they made it quite clear that they were the experts, and that they were fighting against amateurs.
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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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Of all possessions a friend is the most precious.
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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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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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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.