HERACLITUS • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Heraclitus

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Heraclitus

noun

A presocratic Greek philosopher who said that fire is the origin of all things and that permanence is an illusion as all things are in perpetual flux (circa 500 BC).

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Etymology of 'Heraclitus'

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"Heraclitus" Quotes from Famous Books

... above all deserve special notice; one almost universally known, that written by Callimachus on his dead friend, the poet Heraclitus of Halicarnassus; the other, no less noble, though it has not the piercing tenderness of the first, by Claudius Ptolemaeus, the great astronomer, upon his own science, a science then not yet divorced from art and letters. The picture touched by Callimachus of that ancient and brilliant ...

— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail

... pusillae videri soleant, et ob hujusmodi conditiones, gloriae artium minus sint accommodatae." [Cogitata et visa. The expression opinio humida may surprise a reader not accustomed to Bacon's style. The allusion is to the maxim of Heraclitus the obscure: "Dry light is the best." By dry light, Bacon understood the light of the intellect, not obscured by the mists of passion, interest, or prejudice.] This opinion seemed to him "omnia in familia humana turbasse." It had undoubtedly ...

— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... same is the language of Heraclitus of Ephesus, when he remarks that men of eminent capacity and virtue, through the caprice of fortune, have often been overcome by men destitute of either talent or energy. But that that glory is the best when power, existing with high rank, ...

— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus

... very well if no mistakes are made. When Tertullian said, "Credo quia impossibile est,'' we will allow honesty of statement to this great scholar, especially as he was speaking about matters of religion, but when Socrates said of the works of Heraclitus the Obscure: "What I understand of it is good; I think that what I do not understand is also good''—he was not in earnest. Now the case of many people who are not as wise as Tertullian and Socrates is identical ...

— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... existing in all the rest allows of a strong presumption that it would exist also in the government of men, and generally in that of Spirits, if the whole were known to us. One must judge the works of God as wisely as Socrates judged those of Heraclitus in these words: What I have understood thereof pleases me; I think that the rest would please me no less ...

— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz

Words linked to "Heraclitus" : philosopher