Heraclitus Quotes

“Wisdom consists in speaking and acting the truth.”

“The unlike is joined together, and from differences results the most beautiful harmony.”

“You could not step twice into the same rivers; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.”

“The sun is new each day.”

“Whosoever wishes to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details. Knowledge is not intelligence. In searching for the truth be ready for the unexpected. Change alone is unchanging. The same road goes both up and down. The beginning of a circle is also its end. Not I, but the world says it: all is one. And yet everything comes in season.”

“I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets”

“This world... ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out.”

“Big results require big ambitions.”

“The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you choose, what you think and what you do is who you become.”

“Dogs bark at a person whom they do not know.”

“The best people renounce all for one goal, the eternal fame of mortals; but most people stuff themselves like cattle.”

“All things come out of the one, and the one out of all things.”

“Nature is accustomed to hide itself.”

“The way up and the way down are one and the same.”

“No one can step twice into the same river, nor touch mortal substance twice in the same condition. By the speed of its change, it scatters and gathers again.”

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

“Man, like a light in the night, is kindled and put out.”

“Thinking is a sacred disease and sight is deceptive.”

“Abundance of knowledge does not teach men to be wise.”

“The world is nothing but a great desire to live and a great dissatisfaction with living.”

“Life has the name of life, but in reality it is death.”

“What sense or thought do they have? They follow the popular singers, and they take the crowd as their teacher.”

“Where there is no strife there is decay: 'The mixture which is not shaken decomposes.'”

“We have to be faster in calming down a resentment than putting out a fire, because the consequences of the first are infinitely more dangerous than the results of the last; fire ends burning down some houses at the most, while the resentment can cause cruel wars, with the ruin and total destruction of nations.”

“It is wise to agree that all things are one.”