Related:

• The human features and countenance, although composed of but some ten parts or little more
  are so fashioned that among so many thousands of men there are no two in existence who cannot be distinguished from one another....
• Why is it that we entertain the belief that for every purpose odd numbers are the most effectual?
  -- Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD) -- Natural History, Book xxviii, Sect. 23...
• The bird of passage known to us as the cuckoo. -- Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD) -- Natural History, Book xviii, Sect.
  249...
• With man, most of his misfortunes are occasioned by man.
  -- Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD) -- Natural History, Book vii, Sect. 5...
• It was a custom with Apelles, to which he most tenaciously adhered
  never to let any day pass, however busy he might be, without exercising himself by tracing some outline or other,--a practice which has now passed into a proverb....
• It is far from easy to determine whether she [Nature] has proved to him a kind parent or a merciless stepmother.
  -- Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD) -- Natural History, Book vii, Sect. 1...
• Everything is soothed by oil, and this is the reason why divers send out small quantities of it from their mouths, because it smooths every part which is rough.
  -- Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD) -- Natural History, Book ii, Sect. 234...
• To laugh, if but for an instant only, has never been granted to man before the fortieth day from his birth, and then it is looked upon as a miracle of precocity.
  -- Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD) -- Natural History, Book vii, Sect. 2...
• Man is the only one that knows nothing, that can learn nothing without being taught.
  He can neither speak nor walk nor eat, and in short he can do nothing at the prompting of nature only, but weep....