Heraclitus Quotes

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. (Plutarch)
As Meander says, "For our mind is God;" and as Heraclitus, "Man's genius is a deity." View quote
Plutarch
Knowledge of divine things for the most part, as Heraclitus says, is lost to us by incredulity. View quote
Plutarch
Heraclitus says that Pittacus, when he had got Alcæus into his power, released him, saying, "Forgiveness is better than revenge." View quote
Diogenes Laërtius
The natural philosopher Heraclitus said that man is naturally irrational. If this is true, as it is true, then everyone who enjoys futile glory should hide his face. View quote
Apollonius of Tyana
The facts of science, as they appeared to him [Heraclitus], fed the flame in his soul, and in its light, he saw into the depths of the world. View quote
Bertrand Russell
The most perfect soul, says Heraclitus, is a dry light, which flies out of the body as lightning breaks from a cloud. View quote
Plutarch
Thales thought that water was the primordial substance of all things. Heraclitus of Ephesus... thought that it was fire. Democritus and his follower Epicurus thought that it was the atoms, termed by our writers "bodies that cannot be cut up" or, by some "indivisibles." The school of the Pythagoreans added air and the earthy to the water and fire. Hence, although Democritus did not in a strict sense name them, but spoke only of indivisible bodies, yet he seems to have meant these same elements, because when taken by themselves they cannot be harmed, nor are they susceptible of dissolution, nor can they be cut up into parts, but throughout time eternal they forever retain an infinite solidity. View quote
Vitruvius
Not only the Greeks in general - Aristotle no less than Plato - but the great medieval thinkers as well, all held that there was an element of purely receptive "looking," not only in self-perception but also in intellectual knowing or, as Heraclitus said, "Listening-in to the being of things." The medievals distinguished between the intellect as ratio and the intellect as intellectus. Ratio is the power of discursive thought, of searching and re-searching, abstracting, refining, and concluding [cf. Latin dis-currere, "to run to and fro"], whereas intellectus refers to the ability of "simply looking" (simplex intuitus), to which the truth presents itself as a landscape presents itself to the eye. View quote
Josef Pieper
They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead, They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed. View quote
William Johnson Cory
"It is impossible for the same attribute at once to belong and not to belong to the same thing and in the same relation"; and we must add any further qualifications that may be necessary to meet logical objections. This is the most certain of principles, since it possesses the required definition; for it is impossible for anyone to suppose that the same thing is and is not, as some imagine that Heraclitus says. (Aristotle)
Coleridge observes that all men are born Aristotelians or Platonists. The latter feel that classes, orders, and genres are realities; the former, that they are generalizations. For the latter, language is nothing but an approximative set of symbols; for the former, it is the map of the universe. The Platonist knows that the universe is somehow a cosmos, an order; that order, for the Aristotelian, can be an error or a fiction of our partial knowledge. Across the latitudes and the epochs, the two immortal antagonists change their name and language: one is Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Francis Bradley; the other, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, William James. View quote
Jorge Luis Borges
We never step twice into the same Auden.-HERACLITUS. View quote
Randall Jarrell
How can you hide from what never goes away? --Heraclitus. View quote
Elizabeth Wurtzel
If A is A, a philosopher should equal a philosopher. But that's not the way the cosmos works. Similar things set themselves apart from one another. ...What's more, opposites are joined at the hip. Einstein says that most creative acts come from opposition. They come from pitting yourself against someone with another point of view. They come from the law of differentiation. And that was true of Aristotle and his law of identity, his law of noncontradiction, his construction for the base for A is A. Aristotle came up with his idea... to fling a finger in the face of another philosopher [Heraclitus]... View quote
Howard Bloom
The "most extreme" followers of Heraclitus said that it is impossible to fix a name to anything. View quote
Howard Bloom
Aristotle and Heraclitus were both right. A equals A. But A does not equal A. View quote
Howard Bloom
In Science we have finally come back to the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, who said everything is flow, flux, process. There are no "things." View quote
Bruce Lee
They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead, They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed. I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky. View quote
Callimachus
The Immortal Principle was first called water by Thales. Anaximenes called it air. The Pythagoreans called it number and were thus the first to see the Immortal Principle as something nonmaterial. Heraclitus called the Immortal Principle fire and introduced change as part of the Principle. View quote
Robert M. Pirsig
The followers of Heraclitus insisted the Immortal Principle was change and motion. But Parmenides' disciple, Zeno, proved through a series of paradoxes that any perception of motion and change is illusory. Reality had to be motionless. The resolution of the arguments of the Cosmologists came from a new direction entirely, from a group Phædrus seemed to feel were early humanists. They were teachers, but what they sought to teach was not principles, but beliefs of men. Their object was not any single absolute truth, but the improvement of men. All principles, all truths, are relative, they said. "Man is the measure of all things." (Robert M. Pirsig)
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: Change is the only constant. There is nothing permanent except change. View quote
Heraclitus
In Heraclitus' river a fish has imagined the fish of all fish. View quote
Wisława Szymborska
The Geschick of being: a child that plays... Why does it play, the great child of the world-play Heraclitus brought into view in the aiôn? It plays, because it plays. The "because" withers away in the play. The play is without "why." View quote
Martin Heidegger
That which Heraclitus avoided, however, is still the same at that which we shun today: the noise and democratic chatter of the Ephesians, their politics, their latest news of the "Empire,” ... their market business of "today”-for we philosophers need to be spared one thing above all: everything to do with "today.” We reverence what is still, cold, noble, distant, past, and in general everything in the face of which the soul does not have to defend itself and wrap itself up. View quote
Friedrich Nietzsche