Quotes About Heraclitus

As Heraclitus put it, 'Nothing endures but change.

Heraclitus believes in war. "War," he says, "is the father of all and the king of all; and some he has made gods and some men, some bond and some free.

Both Empedocles and Heraclitus held it for a truth that man could not be altogether cleared from injustice in dealing with beasts as he now does.

[Heraclitus had] pride not in logical knowledge but rather in intuitive grasping of the truth.

Each word of Heraclitus expresses the pride and the majesty of truth, but of truth grasped in intuitions rather than attained by the rope ladder of logic.

I have been in love with the thought of Heraclitus.

The parallels to modern physics [with mysticism] appear not only in the Vedas of Hinduism, in the I Ching, or in the Buddhist sutras, but also in the fragments of Heraclitus, in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, or in the teachings of the Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan.

When our natural inheritance has been dissipated, then the spirit too, as Heraclitus says, has descended from its fiery heights. But when spirit becomes heavy it turns to water, and with Luciferian presumption the intellect usurps the seat where once the spirit was enthroned. The spirit may legitimately claim the patria potestas over the soul; not so the earth-born intellect, which is man's sword or hammer, and not a creator of spiritual worlds, a father of the soul.

But Heraclitus' most significant contribution to the thought of subsequent authors of mystical philosophy was his establishment of the word, "Logos," as a term for the immanent presence of God in the world of man's experience.

One must know that war is common, justice is strife, and everything happens according to strife and necessity.

One must realize that war is common, and justice strife, and that all things come to be through strife and are (so) ordained.

Even a soul submerged in sleep is hard at work and helps make something of the world.

Stupidity is doomed, therefore, to cringeat every syllableof wisdom.

As Meander says, "For our mind is God;" and as Heraclitus, "Man's genius is a deity."

At the sight of what goes on in the world, the most misanthropic of men must end by being amused, and Heraclitus must die laughing.

Five hundred years before Christ was born, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus told his students that everything changes except the law of change. He said: You cannot step in the same river twice. The river changes every second; and so does the man who stepped in it. Life is a ceaseless change. The only certainty is today. Why mar the beauty of living today by trying to solve the problems of a future that is shrouded in ceaseless change and uncertainty-a future that no one can possibly foretell?

THE GREEK PHILOSOPHER HERACLITUS left us a lovely epigram: Nature loves to hide. It is so often true. There is no way Heraclitus could have seen an atom. No matter how much his fellow philosophers speculated about them, to see an atom was beyond any technology they might have imagined.

Even sleepers are workers and collaborators on what goes on in the universe.

Stupidity is doomed, therefore, to cringe at every syllable of wisdom.

We must realize that war is universal and strife is justice, and that all things come into the world and pass away through strife.

Only a few stories about Heraclitus' life have survived, and it's not always clear whether they're true. In one tale he sat in front of the famous temple of Artemis playing dice with a group of children. When several Ephesian statesmen expressed their shock to find him wasting his time this way, he snapped, "Why are you so surprised, you asses? I'm better off here with these stupid kids than with you and your politics!

I have often said, and oftener think, that this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel – a solution of why Democritus laughed and Heraclitus wept.

Your mind is like Heraclitus' river. Your mind, in fact, is like nineteenth-century father of psychology William James' "stream of consciousness," a bubbling, babbling brook. Your mind constantly produces different currents of associations, different swirls of thought, and different moods.

We think of life as solid and are haunted when time tells us it is a fluid. Old Heraclitus couldn't have stepped in the same river once, let alone twice.