It is easy at any moment to surrender a large fortune; to build one up is a difficult and an arduous task.
The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things rotten through and through, to avoid.
Interpretation
What this quote means
History provides valuable lessons and insights into human behavior, helping to heal and inform us.
Livy emphasizes the importance of studying history as a means of understanding human experience and behavior. He argues that history serves as a mirror reflecting the complexity of human nature and societal patterns, offering us both examples to emulate and warnings to heed. By immersing ourselves in historical study, we can gain wisdom for our own lives and societies, using the lessons learned from the past to navigate our present and future.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a lecture on the importance of education, I would say, 'As Livy noted, the study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind.'
More from Livy
All quotes →Valor is the soldier's adornment.
The army from Asia introduced a foreign luxury to Rome; it was then the meals began to require more dishes and more expenditure . . . the cook, who had up to that time been employed as a slave of low price, become dear: what had been nothing but a metier was elevated to an art.
Under the influence of fear, which always leads men to take a pessimistic view of things, they magnified their enemies' resources, and minimized their own.
The troubles which have come upon us always seem more serious than those which are only threatening.
No crime can ever be defended on rational grounds.
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The normal curve is a distribution most appropriate to chance and random activity. Education is a purposeful activity and we seek to have students learn what we would teach. Therefore, if we are effective, the distribution of grades will be anything but a normal curve. In fact, a normal curve is evidence of our failure to teach.
We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey.
My upbringing was in the church. We had to attend regularly. And, of course, the church provided a training ground for me, so to speak, as a young vocalist and certainly gave me all of the spiritual values that I needed as a young lady.
What is a child? Ignorance. What is a child? Want of instruction.