"Empedocles" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with divine healing, with the efficacy of images and other sacred objects, and especially in connexion with Orphic and other Mysteries. And, while for the most part Greek philosophy was rather imaginative than mystic, still we encounter the genuine mystic element in such Greek sages as Empedocles and Pythagoras, both of whom assumed the priestly character and seem to have laid claim to supernatural powers. Empedocles indeed, it is said, gave himself out to be a deity exiled from heaven, and was apparently worshipped as such. According to a not very ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... a philosophical Jew who knows his Empedocles—and I grant there are many such in Alexandria, extremely keen and cultivated men—what idea can he form in his own mind of 'creation out of nothing?' Must he not pause to think very seriously when he remembers the fundamental axiom that 'out of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... are possessed by the same preposterous vanity which induced Empedocles to throw himself into Vesuvius, and Erostratus to fire the temple of Diana. I recommend a course of dry cupping to the nape of the neck, to relieve your congested and over-excited brain, and, in the mean time, a decent seclusion ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... soul, it is well to look to its results, its practical utilities; for the pursuit of science merely to gratify an intellectual curiosity is not the noblest employment of our time, although it has been a favorite indulgence of the literary class, and was regarded by the ancient philosopher, Empedocles, as the noblest occupation of man. From this opinion I decidedly dissent, regarding the lawless and excessive indulgence of the intellectual faculties as a species of erratic dissipation, injurious to the manhood of the individual, and pernicious to society ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... view aided doubtless in giving germs of a better evolution theory to the early Greeks. Anaximander, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and, greatest of all, Aristotle, as we have seen, developed them, making their way at times by guesses toward truths since established by observation. Aristotle especially, both by speculation and ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Zeuxippus therefore subjoined and said: And must our present debate be left then unfinished because of that? Or shall we be afraid to oppose that divine oracle to Epicurus? No, by no means, I said; and Empedocles tells us that ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... indestructible must be distinguished the four elements which, though ultimate for us, yet were produced in the beginning by God and are destined some day to be reabsorbed into the divine nature. These with the Stoics were the same which had been accepted since Empedocles—namely earth, air, fire and water. The elements, like the two first principles were bodies; unlike them, they were declared to have ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... I know better than you how irremediable it is. My soul is a doleful morgue, and my pictures are dim photographs of its corpse-tenants. Shut in forever from the sunshine, I dip my brush in the shadows that surround me, for, like Empedocles,— ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... at Agrigentum in Sicily, was contemporary with Empedocles, and must therefore have lived in the 5th century before Christ. The successful measure of lighting large fires, and purifying the air with perfumes, to put a stop to the plague in Athens (430 B.C.), is said to have originated with ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Good master Empedocles, you are welcome. It is long since you went a salamander-gathering down AEtna. Worse than samphire-picking by some odds. 'Tis a mercy your worship did not singe ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... doctrines of his master by showing the absurdities involved in the ideas of variety and of creation, as opposed to one and universal substance. Other philosophers belonging to Iona or Elea may be referred to these schools, as Heraclitus, Empedocles, Democritus, and Anaxagoras, whose doctrines, however, vary from those of the representatives of the philosophical systems above named. Heraclitus (fl. 505 B.C.) dealt rather in intimations of important truths than in popular exposition of them; his cardinal doctrine seems to have been that ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... very same combinations happened to be produced which the law of final causes would have called into being, those combinations which proved to be advantageous to the organism were preserved; while those which were not advantageous perished, and still perished like the minotaurs and sphinxes of Empedocles."[313] ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... other hand, very little liberty; human multiplicity when near its end will fuse itself into a Unity of Will. Do we not see the beginnings already? Thus, without abrupt mutations, will be effected the reintegration of the complex in the one, of old Empedocles' ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... preserve a pure taste. On the contrary, Lord Cromer, especially towards the close of his life, pushed up into all the byways of the Silver Age. As he invariably talked about the books he happened to be reading, it was easy to trace his footsteps. Eight or nine years ago he had a sudden passion for Empedocles, whose fragments he had found collected and translated by Mr. Leonard, an American. Lord Cromer used to march into the Library, and greet me by calling out, "Do you know? Empedocles says" something or other, ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... refer to the four "ultimate elementary particles" of Empedocles. The number was sacred to Hermes, and lay at the root of the physical philosophy of Pythagoras. The quotation in the text is from the "Golden Verses," given in Passow's lexicon under the word tetraktys: nai ma ton hametera psycha paradonta tetraktyn, pagan aenaou physeos. "The most sacred of ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton |
