Polybius Histories Quotes & Sayings

One of the great pleasures of mental health (whatever that is) is how much less time I have to spend thinking about myself. — Susanna Kaysen

Thankfully, God's plans also happen to be much better than my own. — Katie Davis

Even political systems follow a form of rational tinkering, when people are rational hence take the better option: the Romans got their political system by tinkering, not by "reason." Polybius in his Histories compares the Greek legislator Lycurgus, who constructed his political system while "untaught by adversity," to the more experiential Romans, who, a few centuries later, "have not reached it by any process of reasoning [emphasis mine], but by the discipline of many struggles and troubles, and always choosing the best by the light of the experience gained in disaster. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

As long as the egoism is alive, 'my-ness' remains within the self. — Dada Bhagwan

I hope the cooks who are working for me now are getting that kind of experience so they can use what they're learning now as a foundation for a great career. — Thomas Keller

We Christian writers must paint evil with the blackest of brushes, not to sow fear, but to call out the monsters to be scattered by our light. If Satan cloaks himself as an angel of white, intent on deceiving the world, any attempt on our parts to minimize evil is only complicit with his strategy ... Turn to the light; don't fear the shadows it creates. — Ted Dekker

Sometimes, people will just never love dogs. — Jenna Morasca

When love dies and a marriage lies in ruins, the first casualty is honest memory, decent, impartial recall of the past. Too inconvenient, too damning of the present. It's the spectre of old happiness at the feast of failure and desolation. — Ian McEwan

At twenty years old, I was the youngest one at the dungeon, but not by much. No one was over thirty. The head bitch in charge was Mistress Rox. She had been there for eight years, and was known in the city as one of the meanest, baddest, yet most sensual masters. I've seen her shit on a guy. Like, right on his face. There's no way he didn't get pinkeye from that. You can't erase things like that from your memory, no matter how much you want to. It's like herpes in your brain. It's forever. — Asa Akira

Teachers are often, and understandably, impatient for their students to develop clear and adequate ideas. But putting ideas in relation to each other isn't a simple job. It's confusing and this confusion does take time. All of us need time for our confusion if we are to build the breadth and depth that give significance to our knowledge. — Eleanor Duckworth

He indeed who believes that by studying isolated histories he can acquire a fairly just view of history as a whole, is, as it seems to me, much in the case of one, who, after having looked at the dissevered limbs of an animal once alive and beautiful, fancies he has been as good as an eyewitness of the creature itself in all its action and grace. — Polybius

He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safer for children to grow up in. — Ursula K. Le Guin