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.
Interpretation
Life requires a balance of seriousness and enjoyment for mental stability.
This quote by Herodotus emphasizes the importance of integrating fun and relaxation into our daily lives. It suggests that being overly serious can lead to madness or instability, highlighting the necessity of maintaining a healthy balance between work and play for overall well-being.
In practice
During a team meeting, to encourage a lighter atmosphere, you might say, 'Remember, serious work also needs some fun; otherwise, we may lose our minds.'
The Scythians take kannabis seed, creep in under the felts, and throw it on the red-hot stones. It smolders and sends up such billows of steam-smoke that no Greek vapor bath can surpass it. The Scythians howl with joy in these vapor-baths, which serve them instead of bathing, for they never wash their bodies with water.
The man who has planned badly, if fortune is on his side, may have had a stroke of luck; but his plan was a bad one nonetheless.
Men trust their ears less than their eyes.
Great deeds are usually wrought at great risks.
The worst pain a man can have is to know much and be impotent to act.
All men's gains are the fruit of venturing.
I've concluded that the metric by which God will assess my life isn't dollars, but the individual people whose lives I've touched. I think that's the way it will work for us all. Don't worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people.
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.
Appear to know only this--never to fail nor fall.
Practice is funny that way. For days and days, you make out only the fragments of what to do. And then one day you've got the thing whole. Conscious learning becomes unconscious knowledge, and you cannot say precisely how.
I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it.
If we did not have a sense of who we were, how we got here, why we want to achieve something - which, on the face of it, on the logic of it, is probably not worth trying - and prove that logic wrong, then you wouldn't succeed; then you would just evaporate.
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