“my sufferings, which have been bitter, have proved to be lessons of wisdom to me.”
— Herodotus, The Histories, Vol. I (trans. G. C. Macaulay)
“"Do you think," said he, "I have not just cause to weep, when I consider that Alexander at my age had conquered so many nations, and I have all this time done nothing that is memorable?"”
— Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (Dryden trans., rev. A. H. Clough)
“Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.”
— George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Vol. I: Reason in Common Sense (1905)
“He who busies himself in mean occupations produces, in the very pains he takes about things of little or no use, an evidence against himself of his negligence and indisposition to what is really good.”
— Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (Dryden trans., rev. A. H. Clough)
“For heroes have the whole earth for their tomb; and in lands far from their own, where the column with its epitaph declares it, there is enshrined in every breast a record unwritten with no tablet to preserve it, except that of the heart.”
— Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (trans. Richard Crawley)
“Activity does not consist in velocity of change but in constancy of purpose; in the conspiracy of many moments and many processes toward one ideal harmony and one concomitant ideal result.”
— George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Vol. I: Reason in Common Sense (1905)
“he passed the nights without sleep, and avoided all his usual places of recreation, and to those who wondered at the change, and inquired the reason of it, he gave the answer, that "the trophy of Miltiades would not let him sleep."”
— Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (Dryden trans., rev. A. H. Clough)
“Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.”
— Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841)
“In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.”
— Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (trans. Richard Crawley)
“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
— George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Vol. I: Reason in Common Sense (1905)
“The cause of all these evils was the lust for power arising from greed and ambition; and from these passions proceeded the violence of parties once engaged in contention.”
— Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (trans. Richard Crawley)
“But virtue, by the bare statement of its actions, can so affect men's minds as to create at once both admiration of the things done and desire to imitate the doers of them.”
— Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (Dryden trans., rev. A. H. Clough)
Every quote in this collection was verified
against its original public-domain source — the letter, journal, poem or treatise it
truly comes from. No internet folklore, no misattributions.
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