Top 100 Herodotus Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Herodotus

2. “Of all men’s miseries the bitterest is this: to know so much and to have control over nothing.”

— Herodotus

3. “Great things are won by great dangers.”

— Herodotus

4. “It is better by noble boldness to run the risk of being subject to half of the evils we anticipate than to remain in cowardly listlessness for fear of what might happen.”

— Herodotus

5. “Far better it is to have a stout heart always and suffer one’s share of evils, than to be ever fearing what may happen.”

— Herodotus

6. “Of all possessions a friend is the most precious.”

— Herodotus

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

— Herodotus

8. “It is better to be envied than pitied.”

— Herodotus

9. “The worst pain a man can suffer: to have insight into much and power over nothing.”

— Herodotus

10. “In peace sons bury fathers, but war violates the order of nature, and fathers bury sons.”

— Herodotus

11. “If you have two loaves of bread, keep one to nourish the body, but sell the other to buy hyacinths for the soul.”

— Herodotus

12. “The Colchians, Ethiopians and Egyptians have thick lips, broad nose, woolly hair and they are burnt of skin.”

— Herodotus

13. “Circumstances rule men; men do not rule circumstances.”

— Herodotus

14. “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.”

— Herodotus

15. “Where wisdom is called for, force is of little use.”

— Herodotus

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

— Herodotus

17. “Force has no place where there is need of skill.”

— Herodotus

18. “All men’s gains are the fruit of venturing.”

— Herodotus

19. “A multitude of rulers is not a good thing. Let there be one ruler, one king.”

— Herodotus

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

— Herodotus

21. “If a man insisted always on being serious, and never allowed himself a bit of fun and relaxation, he would go mad or become unstable without knowing it.”

— Herodotus

22. “Men trust their ears less than their eyes.”

— Herodotus

23. “History is marked by alternating movements across the imaginary line that separates East from West in Eurasia.”

— Herodotus

24. “Haste in every business brings failures.”

— Herodotus

25. “I know that human happiness never remains long in the same place.”

— Herodotus

26. “He is the best man who, when making his plans, fears and reflects on everything that can happen to him, but in the moment of action is bold.”

— Herodotus

27. “Remember that with her clothes a woman puts off her modesty.”

— Herodotus

28. “In soft regions are born soft men.”

— Herodotus

29. “Great deeds are usually wrought at great risks.”

— Herodotus

30. “The sun will not shine on any country that has borders with ours.”

— Herodotus

31. “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.”

— Herodotus

32. “Call no man happy before he dies.”

— Herodotus

33. “We have two useless gods who never leave our island, but like to dwell in it constantly, Poverty and Helplessness.”

— Herodotus

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

— Herodotus

35. “Just before the Battle of Thermoplyae, a Spartan warrior named Dienekes was told that the Persian archers could blank out the sun with their arrows. He replied “Good, then we shall have our battle in the shade.”

— Herodotus

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

— Herodotus

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

— Herodotus

38. “In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.”

— Herodotus

39. “Mens fortunes are on a wheel, which in its turning suffers not the same man to prosper for ever.”

— Herodotus

40. “The king’s might is greater than human, and his arm is very long.”

— Herodotus

41. “The ear is a less trustworthy witness than the eye.”

— Herodotus

42. “Illness strikes men when they are exposed to change.”

— Herodotus

43. “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.”

— Herodotus

44. “A man calumniated is doubly injured – first by him who utters the calumny, and then by him who believes it.”

— Herodotus

45. “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.”

— Herodotus

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

— Herodotus

47. “Some 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.”

— Herodotus

48. “God does not suffer presumption in anyone but himself.”

— Herodotus

49. “These ‘messengers’ will not be hindered from accomplishing at their best speed the distance which they have to go, either by snow, or rain, or heat, or by the darkness of night.”

— Herodotus

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

— Herodotus