History
The basic idea has been expressed though narrative a number of times. In one "Aesop's fable" that is recorded even before Aesop's time, The Fox and the Cat, the fox boasts of "hundreds of ways of escaping" while the cat has "only one". When they hear the hounds approaching, the cat scampers up a tree while "the fox in his confusion was caught up by the hounds." The fable ends with the moral, "Better one safe way than a hundred on which you cannot reckon." A related concept is expressed by the Centipede's dilemma.
In The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, the main character, Prince Hamlet, is often said to have a mortal flaw of thinking too much, such that his youth and vital energy are, in Shakespeare's words, "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)