If one is sufficiently lavish with time, everything possible happens.
Interpretation
Time is a valuable resource; generous use of it can lead to great outcomes.
Herodotus suggests that when one invests time generously, in various pursuits and endeavors, they create an environment in which numerous possibilities can unfold. This statement underscores the importance of patience and the willingness to dedicate time, as substantial results often require sustained effort and commitment.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about the importance of dedication.
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.
Many seek and never see, anyone can tell them why. O they weep and O they cry and never take until they try unless they try it in their sleep and never some until they die. I ask many, they ask me. This is a great mystery.
Before any of it could make sense, it had to be heard.
Hard conditions of life are indispensable to bringing out the best in human personality.
I am grateful that my horizons were not narrowed at the outset.
Men develop ideas and systems of explanation by absorbing past knowledge and critiquing and superseding it. Women, ignorant of their own history [do] not know what women before them had thought and taught. So generation after generation, they [struggle] for insights others had already had before them, [resulting in] the constant inventing of the wheel.
I've overcome the blow, I've learned to take it well. I only wish my words could just convince myself that it just wasn't real. But that's not the way it feels.
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