Quotes about Herodotus

10 Sourced Quotes

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

Acts themselves alone are history, and these are neither the exclusive property of Hume, Gibbon nor Voltaire, Echard, Rapin, Plutarch, nor Herodotus. Tell me the Acts, O historian, and leave me to reason upon them as I please; away with your reasoning and your rubbish. All that is not action is not worth reading.

There is no reason to deny the Macedonians' own traditions about their early kings and the migration of the Macedones[..] The basic story as provided by Herodotus and Thucydides, minus the interpolation of the Temenid connections, undoubtedly reflects the Macedonians' own traditions about their early history.

Eugene N. Borza

The Theban, somewhere in Herodotus, who says [...] that of all human troubles the most hateful is to feel that you have the capacity of power and yet you have no field to exercise it.

His books were part of him. Each year of his life, it seemed, his books became more and more a part of him. This room, thirty by twenty feet, and the walls of shelves filled with books, had for him the murmuring of many voices. In the books of Herodotus, Tacitus, Rabelais, Thomas Browne, John Milton, and scores of others, he had found men of face and voice more real to him than many a man he had met for a smoke and a talk.

"The bitterest sorrow that man can know is to aspire to do much and to achieve nothing"… so Herodotus relates that a Persian said to a Theban at a banquet (book ix., chap. xvi.). And it is true. With knowledge and desire we can embrace everything, or almost everything; with the will nothing, or almost nothing. And contemplation is not happiness — no! not if this contemplation implies impotence. And out of this collision between our knowledge and our power pity arises.

Miguel de Unamuno

Both Herodotus and Thycidides describe the Macedonians as foreigners, a distinct people lying outside the frontiers of the Greek-city states.

Eugene N. Borza

The fifth century BC historian Herodotus called Egypt 'the gift of the Nile'. The Egyptians themselves went a lot further. They claimed that their sacred river had its source among the stars.

It seems probable that the early Greeks were largely indebted to the Phoenicians for their knowledge of practical arithmetic or the art of calculation, and perhaps also learnt from them a few properties of numbers. It may be worthy of note that Pythagoras was a Phoenician; and according to Herodotus, but this is more doubtful, Thales was also of that race.

W. W. Rouse Ball

ALLIGATOR, N. The crocodile of America, superior in every detail to the crocodile of the effete monarchies of the Old World. Herodotus says the Indus is, with one exception, the only river that produces crocodiles, but they appear to have gone West and grown up with the other rivers. From the notches on his back the alligator is called a sawrian.