Greek Historian Quotes

Herodotus

Thucydides

Polybius

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

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

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.

But physicians also cure more desperate maladies by harsh remedies, and a pilot, when he fears shipwreck, rescues by jettison whatever can be saved.

Quintus Curtius Rufus

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