Ancient Historian Quotes

Herodotus

Sima Qian

Livy

Thucydides

Polybius

It is well to bear in mind that chances rule men, and not men chances.

Toil and pleasure, in their natures opposite, are yet linked together in a kind of necessary connection.

Now when the ancient Egyptians, awestruck and wondering, turned their eyes to the heavens, they concluded that two gods, the sun and the moon, were primeval and eternal; and they called the former Osiris, the latter Isis.

Diodorus Siculus

All this he said with so steady a voice and countenance, that he seemed to be passing, not out of life, but merely from one house to another.

Cornelius Nepos

For sometimes the course of things is as arbitrary as the plans of man; indeed this is why we usually blame chance for whatever does not happen as we expected.

We must rather seek for a cause, for every event whether probable or improbable must have some cause.

There is no fixed road to wealth, and goods do not stay with the same master forever.

The contact with manners then is education; and this Thucydides appears to assert when he says history is philosophy learned from examples.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus