Quotes from Herodotus

Force has no place where there is need of skill.

Some men give up their designs when they have almost reached the goal; While others, on the contrary, obtain a victory by exerting, at the last moment, more vigorous efforts than ever before.

When life is so burdensome death has become a sought after refuge.

Adversity has the effect of drawing out strength and qualities of a man that would have laid dormant in its absence.

The secret of success is that it is not the absence of failure, but the absence of envy.

The trials of living and the pangs of disease make even the short span of life too long.

Happiness is not fame or riches or heroic virtues, but a state that will inspire posterity to think in reflecting upon our life, that it was the life they would wish to live.

The gods love to punish whatever is greater than the rest.

The most hateful human misfortune is for a wise man to have no influence.

When a woman removes her garment, she also removes the respect that is hers.

How much better a thing it is to be envied than to be pitied.

Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.

All of life is action and passion, and not to be involved in the actions and passions of your time is to risk having not really lived at all.

If one is sufficiently lavish with time, everything possible happens.

It's impossible for someone who is human to have all good things together, just as there is no single country able to provide all good things for itself.

For of those [cities] that were great in earlier times, most of them have now become small, while those which were great in my time were small formerly.

Civil strife is as much a greater evil than a concerted war effort as war itself is worse than peace.

As the old saw says well: every end does not appear together with its beginning.

The most hateful grief of all human griefs is to have knowledge of a truth, but no power over the event.

Love of honor is a very shady sort of possession.

The gods loves to punish whatever is greater than the rest.

The period of a [Persian] boy's education is between the ages of five and twenty, and he is taught three things only: to ride, to use the bow, and to speak the truth.

Now it happened that this Candaules was in love with his own wife; and not only so, but thought her the fairest woman in the whole world. This fancy had strange consequences.

He advises them that tough lands produce tough peoples, so, if they wish to retain the empire he has enabled them so spectacularly to gain, they must not even think about removing themselves to some softer, enervating environment.