Related:

• The best plan is, as the common proverb has it, to profit by the folly of others.
  -- Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD) -- Natural History, Book xviii, Sect. 31...
• 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...
• Let not things, because they are common, enjoy for that the less share of our consideration.
  -- Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD) -- Natural History, Book xix, Sect. 59...
• 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...
• 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...
• When a building is about to fall down, all the mice desert it.
  -- Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD) -- Natural History, Book viii, Sect. 103...