Heraclitus of Ephesus; circa 500 BCE
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Heraclitus' name for the flux, or process, that underlies all that exists in the universe is
fire; a metaphor for the shifting meanings of all truth.
Therefore, for Heraclitus, the verbal account, or
logos* of the world is also fire. Truth, wisdom, knowledge, reality: None can stand apart from
this fire that allows no objective fixity.
Heraclitus lived 2,500 years ago in the ancient Greek city of Ephesus. He was heir to the throne in Ephesus, one of the world's most powerful cities.
Heraclitus forsaked his kingdom and chose instead to seek the Word
* of wisdom. His writings survived the Persian empire, dominant in
his time, and then the Greek and Roman. Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius and others quoted him in high respect. His quotes in the books of other
philosophers are all that is left of Heraclitus' body of work. The Book of Heraclitus, with thousands of the finest works of philosophy, mysteriously
disappeared forever. Now only 130 fragments of those thousands of works remain.
Here are a few of my favorite Heraclitean maxims, or formulas:
The soul is undiscovered, though explored forever to a depth beyond report.
Just as the river where I step is not the same, and is, so I am as I am not.
From the strain of binding opposites comes harmony.
By cosmic rule, as day yields night, so winter summer, war peace, plenty famine. All things change. Fire penetrates the lump of myrrh, until the joining bodies die and rise again in smoke called incense.
How, from a fire that never sinks or sets, would you escape?
One thunderbolt strikes root through everything.
Hunger, even in the elements, and insolence.
Yearning hurts, and what release may come of it feels much like death.
That which always was, and is, and will be everlasting fire, the same for all, the cosmos, made neither by god nor man, replenishes in measure as it burns away.
Wisdom is the oneness of mind that guides and permeates all things.
Silence, healing.
Whoever cannot seek the unforeseen sees nothing, for the known way is an impasse.
Those unmindful when they hear, for all they make of their intelligence, may be regarded as the walking dead.
The river where you set your foot just now is gone --- those waters giving way to this, now this.
The living, when the dead wood of the bow springs back to life, must die.
As souls change into water on their way through death, so water changes into earth. And as water springs from earth, so from water does the soul.
Many fail to grasp what they have seen, and cannot judge what they have learned, although they tell themselves they know.
People dull their wits with gibberish, and cannot use their ears and eyes.
Stupidity is doomed to cringe at every syllable of wisdom.
Many who have learned from Hesiod the countless names of gods and monsters never understand that night and day are one.
The cosmos works by harmony of tensions, like the lyre and bow. Therefore, good and ill are one.
Good and ill to the physician surely must be one, since he derives his fee from torturing the sick.
Applicants for wisdom do what I have done: inquire within.
The habit of knowledge is not human but divine.
Give me one man from among a hundred thousand, if he be the best.
To a god the wisdom of the wisest man sounds apish. Beauty in a human face looks apish too. In everything we have attained the excellence of apes.
One's bearing shapes one's fate.
After death comes nothing hoped for nor imagined.
Since mindfulness, of all things, is the ground of being, to speak one's true mind, and to keep things known in common, serves all being, just as laws made
clear uphold the city, yet with greater strength. Of all pronouncements of the law the one source is the Word whereby we choose what helps true mindfulness
prevail.
*The most accurate translation of the Greek word
logos is Word.
Logos indicates not only the lexical
word, but also all means of making ideas known, as well as ideas themselves, the phenomena to which ideas respond, and the rules that govern both phenomena
and ideas.
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