Presocratic Philosophers

"Philo... says: "For that which is made up of both the opposites is one; and, when the one is divided, the opposites are disclosed. Is not this... what the Greeks say their great and much belauded Herakleitos put in the forefront of his philosophy as summing it all up, and boasted of as a new discovery?""

"[H]e believed himself to have attained insight into... truth... not hitherto... recognised, though... staring men in the face (fr. 93). ...[W]e must ...find out what he was thinking ...when he launched into ...denunciations of human dulness and ignorance. The answer... in ...fragments, 18 and 45 ... the many apparently independent and conflicting things we know are really one, and ...this one is also many. The "strife of opposites" is really an "attunement" ...[[Wisdom|[W]isdom]] is not a knowledge of many things, but the perception of the underlying unity of the warring opposites."

"Herakleitos looks down not only on the mass of men, but on all previous inquirers into nature."

"Most... commentators on Herakleitos... in Diogenes were Stoics, and... their paraphrases were sometimes taken for the original. ...Stoics ...sought to interpret him ...in accordance with their ...system. ...[T]hey were fond of "accommodating"... views... to their own..."

"[S]ome... fragments are far from clear, and there are probably not a few of which the meaning will never be recovered. ...[T]he doxographers... are far less instructive with... Herakleitos... [T]he two accounts of... Herakleitos... in Diogenes, which goes back to the Vetusta Placita... is... pretty full and accurate. All our other sources are... tainted."

"Theophrastos... said... the headstrong temperament of Herakleitos sometimes led him into incompleteness and inconsistencies of statement. ...[A] very different thing from studied obscurity and the disciplina arcana sometimes attributed to him; if Herakleitos does not go out of his way to make his meaning clear, neither does he hide it (fr. 11)."

"[F]ragments about the Delphic god and the Sibyl (frs. 11 and 12) seem to show... an oracular style... [I]t was the manner of the time. The stirring events of the age, and... religious revival, gave... a prophetic tone to all the leaders of thought. Pindar and Aischylos have it too. They all feel... inspired. It is also the age of... individualities... apt to be solitary and disdainful. Herakleitos... [writes] If men cared to dig for the gold they might find it (fr. 8); if not, they must be content with straw (fr. 51)."

"We do not know the title of the work of Herakleitos... We are told that it was divided into three discourses: one dealing with the universe, one political, and one theological. It is not likely that this division is due to Herakleitos... The style... is... obscure, and... later... got him the nickname... "the Dark.""

"[P]erhaps... he belonged to the ancient royal house and resigned the nominal position of in favour of his brother."

"[L]ikely he was not a disciple of any one; but... he was acquainted both with the Milesian cosmology and with the poems of Xenophanes. He... knew something of the theories taught by Pythagoras (fr. 17)."

"If neither sub-atomic particles nor organic species exemplify the 'permanent entities' of Greek metaphysics, what else in the real world does so? ...Two hundred years of historical research have had their effect. Whether we turn to social or intellectual history, evolutionary zoology, historical geology or astronomy—whether we consider explanatory theories or star-clusters, societies or cultures, languages or disciplines, organic species or the Earth itself—the verdict is not Parmenidean but Heraclitean. As we now understand it, nothing in the empirical world possesses the permanent unchanging identity which all Greek natural philosophers (the Epicureans apart) presupposed in the ultimate elements of Nature. So, if we... are to entertain metaphysical thoughts about the nature of things-in-general consistent with the rest of our late-twentieth-century ideas, we must explore the consequences of the modern, post-Darwinian or 'populational' approach, as applied not just to species, but to historical entities of all kinds. Confronted with the question, 'How do permanent entities preserve their identity through all their apparent changes?', we must simply deny the validity of the question itself. In its place, we must substitute the question, 'How do historical entities maintain their coherence and continuity, despite all the real changes they undergo?'"

"I cannot approve of Heraclitus, who, being self-taught and arrogant, said, "I have explored myself." Nor can I praise him for hiding his poem in the temple of Artemis, in order that it might be published afterwards as a mystery; and those who take an interest in such things say that Euripides the tragic poet came there and read it, and, gradually learning it by heart, carefully handed down to posterity this darkness of Heraclitus."

"The part I understand is excellent, and so too is, I dare say, the part I do not understand; but it needs a Delian diver to get to the bottom of it."

"When... Heraclitus names the world an ever-living fire that... extinguishes itself and again kindles itself, when... all is exchanged for fire and fire for all... he can only understand by this that fire, this restless, all-consuming, all-transmuting, and equally (in heat) all-vivifying element, represents the constant force of this eternal alteration and transformation, the notion of life, in the most vivid and energetic manner. ...the means of which the power of motion that is precedent to all matter avails itself for the production of the living process of things. Heraclitus... explains the multiplicity of things... [fire] condenses itself into material elements, first air, then water, then earth. ...These two processes of extinction and ignition... alternate... in perpetual rotation with each other and... in stated periods the world resolves itself into the primal fire, in order to re-create itself out of it again. ...[F]ire is to him... the principle of movement, of physical as of spiritual vitality; the soul itself is a fiery vapour; its power and perfection depend on its being pure from all grosser and duller elements."

"If the flow is steady, the field velocity vectors and the system of streamlines remain unaffected by the progress of time. Looking at the vector field and its streamlines we do not notice any change. Yet if we could distinguish the different particles of fluid from each other, we could observe incessant change... We have here two aspects of a steady flow, one of unchanging persistence, the other of incessant change. ...Heraclitus was called the "Dark Philosopher"; his views of human affairs were sombre and his sayings obscure. ... "You cannot look twice at the same river; for fresh waters are ever flowing in." "We look and do not look at the same rivers; we are, and we are not." What is the intended meaning of these sentences? I do not venture to find out. Yet I think that the originator of these senteces came pretty close to formulating the concept "steady flow of a fluid.""

"Herakleitos, about 460 B.C., one of the boldest thinkers of ancient Greece, declared that Homer deserved to be ejected from public assemblies and flogged..."

"In other countries, too, the idea of a creation was sternly rejected, as, for instance, by Heraclitus, who declares that no god and no man made this world, but that it was always and is and will be, an eternal fire, assuming forms and destroying them. And this protest, it should be remembered, came from a man who was able to say with equal honesty that 'God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and hunger—and that he is called according to the pleasure of every one.'"

"I walked on to the next corner, sat on a bench at a bus stop, and read in my new book about Heraclitus. All things flow like a river, he said; nothing abides. Parmenides, on the other hand, believed that nothing ever changed, it only seemed so. Both views appealed to me."

"[With Heraclitus] we see land; there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my Logic."

"In... Heraclitus... Becoming occupies the foremost place. He regarded that which moves, the fire, as the basic element. The difficulty, to reconcile the... one fundamental principle with the infinite variety of phenomena, is solved... by recognizing... strife of... opposites is... a kind of harmony. ...[T]he world is ...one and many ..."the opposite tension" of ...opposites ...constitutes the unity of the One. He says: "...war is common to all and strife is justice ...all things come into being and pass away through strife." ...[T]hat infinite and eternal undifferentiated Being ...cannot ...explain the infinite variety of things. This leads to the antithesis of Being and Becoming and ...to the solution of Heraclitus ...change ...is the fundamental principle; the "imperishable change, that renovates the world," as the poets have called it. But ...change ...is not a material cause and therefore is represented ...by the fire ...both matter and a moving force. ...[[Physics|[P]hysics]] is ...extremely near to ...Heraclitus ...[i]f we replace ..."fire" by ..."energy" ...Energy is a substance, since its total ...does not change, and ...elementary particles can ...be made from this ...Energy may be called the fundamental cause for all change in the world. ...Energy is ...that which moves; it may be called the primary cause of all change, and ...can be transformed into matter or heat or light. The strife between opposites in the philosophy of Heraclitus can be found in the strife between two different forms of energy."

"It was not Zeno, the founder of the Stoics, alone, who taught that the Universe evolves, and its primary substance is transformed from the state of fire into that of air, then into that of water, etc. Heraclitus of Ephesus maintained that the one principle that underlies all phenomena in Nature is fire. The intelligence that moves the Universe is fire, and fire is intelligence. And while Anaximenes said the same of air, and Thales of Miletus (600 years b.c.) of water, the Esoteric Doctrine reconciles all these philosophers, by showing that though each was right, the system of none was complete."

"Of Every One-Hundred Men, Ten shouldn't even be there, Eighty are nothing but targets, Nine are real fighters... We are lucky to have them... They make the battle. Ah but the One, One of them is a Warrior... and He will bring the others back."

"Many statements paraphrase or extend upon his famous assertions that "everything changes" in ways which arguably diverge from valid translation, and yet have become widely attributed to Heraclitus:"

"Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony."

"It pertains to all men to know themselves and to learn self-control."

"I have sought for myself."

"φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ"

"ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων"

"All human laws are nourished by one divine law."

"Speaking with sense we must fortify ourselves in the common sense of all, as a city is fortified by its law, and even more forcefully. For all human laws are nourished by the one divine law. For it prevails as far as it will and suffices for all and is superabundant."

"ἀνθρώποις γίνεσθαι ὁκόσα θέλουσιν οὐκ ἄμεινον"

"ἀμαθίην κρύπτειν ἄμεινον"

"κύνες γὰρ καὶ βαΰζουσινὃν, ἂν μὴ γινώσκωσι."

"νέκυες γὰρ κοπρίων ἐκβλητότεροι"

"Men are at variance with the one thing with which they are in the most unbroken communion, the reason that administers the whole universe."

"Although the Law of Reason is common, the majority of people live as though they had an understanding of their own."

"ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ"

"τοῖς ἐγρηγορόσιν ἕνα καὶ κοινὸν κόσμον εἶναι, τῶν δὲ κοιμωμένων ἕκαστον εἰς ἴδιον ἀποστρέφεσθαι"

"ταὐτό τ' ἔνι ζῶν καὶ τεθνηκὸς καὶ [τὸ] ἐγρηγορὸς καὶ καθεῦδον καὶ νέον καὶ γηραιόν"

"ὁ θεὸς ἡμέρη εὐφρόνη, χειμὼν θέρος, πόλεμος εἰρήνη, κόρος λιμός"

"ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή"

"οὐκ ἐμοῦ, ἀλλὰ τοῦ λόγου ἀκούσαντας ὁμολογεῖν σο­φόν ἐστιν ἓν πάντα εἶναί"

"Into the same rivers we step and do not step, we are and are not. (Heraclitus Homericus)"

"B49a. potamois tois autois …"

"μάχεσθαι χρὴ τὸν δῆμον ὑπὲρ τοῦ νόμου ὅκωσπερ τείχεος"

"πολυμαθίη νόον οὐ διδάσκει"

"ἓν τὸ σοφὸν μοῦνον λέγεσθαι οὐκ ἐθέλει καὶ ἐθέλει Ζηνὸς ὄνομα"

"κόσμον τόνδε, τὸν αὐτὸν ἁπάντων, οὔτε τις θεῶν οὐτε ἀνθρώπων ἐποίησεν, ἀλλ' ἦν ἀεὶ καὶ ἔστιν καὶ ἔσται πῦρ ἀείζωον, ἁπτόμενον μέτρα καὶ ἀποσβεννύμενον μέτρα"

"ἄνθρωπος ἐν εὐφρόνῃ φάος ἅπτεται ἑαυτῷ [ἀποθανὼν] ἀποσβεσθεὶς"

"ἐὰν μὴ ἔλπηται ἀνέλπιστον, οὐκ ἐξευρήσει"