Archilochus Quotes

We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.

We do not rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training.” —Archilochus

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one, but that is the best of all.

I have a high art: I hurt with cruelty those who would wound me.

In the hospitality of war we left them their dead to remember us by.

We don’t rise to the level of our expectations; we fall to the level of our training.” —Archilochus

Be brave, my heart [wrote the poet and mercenary Archilochus]. Plant your feet and square your shoulders to the enemy. Meet him among the man-killing spears. Hold your ground. In victory, do not brag; in defeat, do not weep.

Heart, my heart, so battered with misfortune far beyond your strength, up, and face the men who hate us. Bare your chest to the assault of the enemy, and fight them off. Stand fast among the beamlike spears. Give no ground; and if you beat them, do not brag in open show, nor, if they beat you, run home and lie down on your bed and cry. Keep some measure in the joy you take in luck, and the degree you give away to sorrow. All your life is up-and-down like this.

The fox knows many tricks; the hedgehog one good one.

Be brave, my heart [wrote the poet and mercenary Archilochus]. Plant your feet and square your shoulders to the enemy. Meet him among the man-killing spears. Hold your ground. In victory, do not brag; in defeat, do not weep. The ancients resisted innovation in warfare because they feared it would rob the struggle of honor. King Agis was shown a new catapult, which could shoot a killing dart 200 yards. When he saw this, he wept. “Alas,” he said. “Valor is no more.

Some Saian mountaineer Struts today with my shield. I threw it down by a bush and ran When the fighting got hot. Life seemed somehow more precious. It was a beautiful shield. I know where I can buy another Exactly like it, just as round.

The fox knows many tricks, the hedgehog only one. One good one.

Archilochus: “The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

There’s one big thing I know, to pay back injury done to me with terrible injuries.

πόλλ' οἶδ' ἀλώπηξ, ἐχῖνος δ'ἓν μέγα

If I had to hold up the most heavily guarded bank in Europe and I could choose my partners in crime, I’d take a gang of five poets, no question about it. Five real poets, Apollonian or Dionysian, but always real, ready to live and die like poets. No one in the world is as brave as a poet. No one in the world faces disaster with more dignity and understanding. They may seem weak, these readers of Guido Cavalcanti and Arnaut Daniel, these readers of the deserter Archilochus who picked his way across a field of bones. And they work in the void of the word, like astronauts marooned on dead-end planets, in deserts where there are no readers or publishers, just grammatical constructions or stupid songs sung not by men but by ghosts. In the guild of writers they’re the greatest and least sought-after jewel. When some deluded kid decides at sixteen or seventeen to be a poet, it’s a guaranteed family tragedy. Gay Jew, half black, half Bolshevik: the Siberia of the poet’s exile tends to bring shame on his family too. Readers of Baudelaire don’t have it easy in high school, or with their schoolmates, much less with their teachers. But their fragility is deceptive. So is their humor and the fickleness of their declarations of love. Behind these shadowy fronts are probably the toughest people in the world, and definitely the bravest. Not for nothing are they descended from Orpheus, who set the stroke for the Argonauts and who descended into hell and came up again, less alive than before his feat, but still alive. If I had to hold up the most heavily fortified bank in America, I’d take a gang of poets. The attempt would probably end in disaster, but it would be beautiful.

In the EPJ results, there were two statistically distinguishable groups of experts. The first failed to do better than random guessing, and in their longer-range forecasts even managed to lose to the chimp. The second group beat the chimp, though not by a wide margin, and they still had plenty of reason to be humble. Indeed, they only barely beat simple algorithms like “always predict no change” or “predict the recent rate of change.” Still, however modest their foresight was, they had some. So why did one group do better than the other? It wasn’t whether they had PhDs or access to classified information. Nor was it what they thought—whether they were liberals or conservatives, optimists or pessimists. The critical factor was how they thought. One group tended to organize their thinking around Big Ideas, although they didn’t agree on which Big Ideas were true or false. Some were environmental doomsters (“We’re running out of everything”); others were cornucopian boomsters (“We can find cost-effective substitutes for everything”). Some were socialists (who favored state control of the commanding heights of the economy); others were free-market fundamentalists (who wanted to minimize regulation). As ideologically diverse as they were, they were united by the fact that their thinking was so ideological. They sought to squeeze complex problems into the preferred cause-effect templates and treated what did not fit as irrelevant distractions. Allergic to wishy-washy answers, they kept pushing their analyses to the limit (and then some), using terms like “furthermore” and “moreover” while piling up reasons why they were right and others wrong. As a result, they were unusually confident and likelier to declare things “impossible” or “certain.” Committed to their conclusions, they were reluctant to change their minds even when their predictions clearly failed. They would tell us, “Just wait.” The other group consisted of more pragmatic experts who drew on many analytical tools, with the choice of tool hinging on the particular problem they faced. These experts gathered as much information from as many sources as they could. When thinking, they often shifted mental gears, sprinkling their speech with transition markers such as “however,” “but,” “although,” and “on the other hand.” They talked about possibilities and probabilities, not certainties. And while no one likes to say “I was wrong,” these experts more readily admitted it and changed their minds. Decades ago, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote a much-acclaimed but rarely read essay that compared the styles of thinking of great authors through the ages. To organize his observations, he drew on a scrap of 2,500-year-old Greek poetry attributed to the warrior-poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” No one will ever know whether Archilochus was on the side of the fox or the hedgehog but Berlin favored foxes. I felt no need to take sides. I just liked the metaphor because it captured something deep in my data. I dubbed the Big Idea experts “hedgehogs” and the more eclectic experts “foxes.” Foxes beat hedgehogs. And the foxes didn’t just win by acting like chickens, playing it safe with 60% and 70% forecasts where hedgehogs boldly went with 90% and 100%. Foxes beat hedgehogs on both calibration and resolution. Foxes had real foresight. Hedgehogs didn’t.

Harry carefully transferred the pet to Beatrix's hands. "'The fox has many tricks,'" he quoted, "'the hedgehog only one.'" He smiled at Beatrix as he added, "but it's a good one." "Archilochus," Beatrix said promptly. "You read Greek poetry, Mr. Rutledge?" "Not usually. But I make an exception for Archilocus. He knew how to make a point." "Father used to call him a 'raging iambic,'" Poppy said, and Harry laughed. And in that moment, Poppy made her decision. Because even though Harry Rutledge had his flaws, he admitted them freely. And a man who could charm a hedgehog and understand jokes about ancient Greek poets was a man worth taking a risk on. She wouldn't be able to marry for love, but she could at least marry for hope.

The Greek philosopher Archilochus tells us, the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one great thing. The fox—artful, sly and astute—represents the financial institution that knows many things about complex markets and sophisticated marketing. The hedgehog—whose sharp spines give it almost impregnable armor when it curls into a ball—is the financial institution that knows only one great thing: long-term investment success is based on simplicity. John C. Bogle

The Greek poet Archilochus once observed that the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one important thing—a phrase later made famous by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin. Bogle was the quintessential hedgehog. He always believed in one big thing with a fiery passion. He had the integrity and intellectual suppleness to shift positions, though. When he was later confronted with his change of heart on the merits of active investing, he quoted the economist John Maynard Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

warrior-poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

The poet Archilochus wrote, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” In Good to Great, Collins demonstrates that great organizations live and breathe from a hedgehog concept. They are ruthlessly clear about the one thing at which they can be the best in the world. Organizations that act like foxes, chasing after too much too often, never achieve a singular focus. They stay stuck being “good.”4

Had the ancient Greek poet Archilochus and the modern philosopher Isaiah Berlin been magically transported to northern Italy in November of 218 B.C., they might well have speculated on the strategic prospects. “Hannibal knows many things, but Rome knows one big thing,” the Greek might have proposed. To which Berlin might have replied, “Perhaps at the outset. But then the fox could get stuck in a rut, and the hedgehog might learn new tricks.” This would have been the Second Punic War epitomized.

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one important thing,” proclaims an ancient fragment attributed to the Greek poet Archilochus. It is implied that the hedgehog curls into the side of higher wisdom, and we are advised to sink into the still depths of this hedgehog way of knowing. Discerning people have told me that because no one can do everything needed to help the troubled world, it is most impactful (and least confounding) to focus our passion on one thing. Pick one cause, one creature, one ecosystem. Go deep. I think this is mostly true.

Once, unfortunately, in a crisis situation (as the Greek poet Archilochus pointed out so long ago) we don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training. Once again, the issue is fear. The more fear in the equation, the fewer options at our disposal. In times of strife, the brain limits our choices to speed up our reaction times. The extreme example being, fight or flight, where the situation is so dire, that the brain gives us only potential actions. Freezing is the third, yet the same thing happens to a lesser degree under any high stress conditions. And the responses we fall back upon under duress, are the ones we fully automatized: those habitual patterns we've executed over and over again.

THERE IS A LINE among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.’2 Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog’s one defence. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel – a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance – and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle. These last lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal; their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce are foxes.

Горя ні плачучи не пригашу, ні його не зроблю я Гіршим, коли святкувать і веселитись почну.

Мужньо на ворога йди, що на рідне напав твоє місто, Страху не май, не тремти — смерть же одна для усіх. А з поля бою коли побіжиш — затремтять тоді й інші, Бог і в погибельну мить успіх не раз подає! Ну а коли ти — один, коли військо усе полягло вже, Бій коли програний вже, і помогти анічим Ти вже вітчизні не можеш, то що тоді щит для вітчизни? Кинь його — воїна ти, сина для неї зберіг!.. Скаже негідник, що ти — боягуз? І нехай! А ти — знаєш, Що за родимий свій край сміло життя покладеш! Будеш боятись, що хтось там тебе назве боягузом — То небагато утіх матимеш, друже, в житті!

Хтось із саійців щитом моїм нині хизується, певно: Славний був щит, але ба, кинуть в кущі довелось Душу зате я зберіг, ну а щит? Та що мені щит той? Хай собі!.. Інший куплю — гіршим не буде, либонь.

Nevertheless, it is said that the people of Massalia fenced their vineyards round with the bones of the fallen, and that the soil, after the bodies had wasted away in it and the rains had fallen all winter upon it, grew so rich and became so full to its depths of the putrefied matter that sank into it, that it produced an exceeding great harvest in after years, and confirmed the saying of Archilochus​ that "fields are fattened" by such a process.

Be brave, my heart [wrote the poet and mercenary Archilochus]. Plant your feet and square your shoulders to the enemy. Meet him among the man-killing