Heraclitus

For Heraclitus, the son of Blyson, persuaded Melancomas the tyrant to lay down his rule.

For Heraclitus says that the future was shown to the Sibyl not in human fashion, but with God.

" For he knew, I think, that "much learning does not teach one to have understanding," according to Heraclitus.

Heraclitus, after all his speculations on the conflagration of the universe, was filled within with water, plastered over with cow-dung, and so died.

Always remember the saying of Heraclitus, that the death of earth is to become water, the death of water to become air, of air fire, and back again.

Thither we too must change our place — where so many mighty orators, so many grave philosophers, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates;

" But if you will not hearken to the prophetess, hearken at least to your own philosopher, Heraclitus of Ephesus, reproaching the statues with their insensibility:

"but Hades and Dionysus are the same, in whose honour they rave and keep the Lenaean rite" — not so much because of the drunkenness of the body, as I think, as because of the disgraceful initiation into wantonness.

"To night-roamers, magi, Bacchants, Maenads, initiates" — to these he threatens the things after death, to these he prophesies the fire;

The Pythagoreans wish all things to proceed from numbers and the first principles of the mathematicians.

And so, for several days, with Heraclitus brought in and several other learned men, among them Antiochus's brother Aristus, and besides Aristo and Dio, to whom he assigned the most weight after his brother, we spent much time in that one discussion.

'When I was proquaestor at Alexandria, Antiochus was with me, and already before that there was at Alexandria a friend of Antiochus, Heraclitus of Tyre, who had been a pupil of Clitomachus for many years and of Philo as well — a man approved and renowned in that philosophy which is now almost dismissed but is being recalled.

Nor do you hide it from me as Pythagoras was wont to hide things from strangers, nor do you speak obscurely on purpose like Heraclitus;

But your school, Balbus, is wont to refer all things to a fiery force, following, I believe, Heraclitus, whom not all interpret in one way;

Heraclitus, establishing common reason as the best criterion of truth, says, those things are certain which generally appear so.

In the same manner Heraclitus, as cited by Plato in Cratylus, and Seneca in the place already quoted, has said, that we cannot descend twice into the same river.

Therefore Heraclitus, whose surname came from the obscurity of his speech, said:

"We go down into the same river twice, and we do not go down into it.

as Thales water, Heraclitus fire, Anaximenes air, Anaximander all the heavenly bodies, Strato heaven and earth, Zeno air and aether, Plato the stars (which kind of gods he calls fiery) — when, considering of the world its greatness and force and power and honour and beauty, the resource, the constancy, the law of the several elements, which conspire to the begetting, nourishing, completing, and re …

For what that dark Heraclitus said — "the same way up and down.

so that with good reason that obscure Heraclitus, observing the vaster fogs among the examiners of the soul, declared out of weariness with the questions that he had nowise found the boundaries of the soul, though he had entered upon every road.

these draw its origin from one quarter, those draw its departure off to another — according as either the prestige of Plato, or the vigour of Zeno, or the steadiness of Aristotle, or the stupor of Epicurus, or the gloom of Heraclitus, or the frenzy of Empedocles has persuaded them.

After the solemnities were over and the people dismissed — it being her custom to report to us what she has seen (for these things are most diligently sorted, that they may even be proved) — ‘Among other things,’ she said, ‘there was shown to me a soul corporeally, and a spirit appeared, but not of an empty and void quality, rather one that even promised to be held in the hand, tender and lucid an …

And to me, indeed, it seems that, since there had been two opinions among the philosophers of old—one of those who held that all things come to pass by fate in such a way that this fate brings the force of necessity (in which opinion were Democritus, Heraclitus, Empedocles, and Aristotle), the other of those to whom it seemed that the voluntary motions of the mind are without any fate—Chrysippus, …

either if you do it on purpose, as Heraclitus, 'surnamed the Obscure, because he wrote of nature too darkly,' or when the obscurity of the matter, not of the words, makes the discourse not understood, as is the case in Plato's Timaeus.

There is in Heraclitus the physicist a saying about Hermodorus, chief of the Ephesians;

he says that all the Ephesians ought to be punished with death, because, when they expelled Hermodorus from the state, they spoke thus:

Since you appear to be in other respects an admirer of Socrates and to be struck with wonder at the man in your discourses, can you tell me whose disciple among the wise he was — as Pheidias the maker of statues was of Hegias, and Polygnotus the painter and his brother both of their father Aglaophon, and Pherecydes is said to have become the teacher of Pythagoras, and Pythagoras of Empedocles and …

Seems crazed folly.

The thing he calls the fire.

If formed of fire, single and pure?

Therefore you were quite right in saying that knowledge is nothing else than perception, and there is complete identity between the doctrine of Homer and Heracleitus and all their followers—that all things are in motion, like streams—the doctrine of the great philosopher Protagoras that man is the measure of all things—and the doctrine of Theaetetus that, since these things are true, perception is knowledge.

Heraclitus, as often as he had gone out and seen so many living ill about him—nay, perishing ill—would weep, would pity all who met him glad and prosperous, with a mild but too feeble spirit, and he himself was among those to be lamented.

that all the vices of the crowd seem to us not hateful but laughable, and that we imitate Democritus rather than Heraclitus.

The philosophers did less—Heraclitus, who smeared himself with cow-dung and so burned himself up;

another of fire, as it seemed to Heraclitus.

and where anything is alleged about a fiery god, there Heraclitus intervenes.