Heraclitus
Fragments
1.
It is wise, listening not to me but to the Law, to acknowledge that all
things are one.
3.
Fools when they hear are like deaf men; it is of them that the saying
bears witness, “though present they are not there.”
5.
Many do not think about the things they experience, nor do they know the
things they learn; but they think they do.
7.
You will not find the unexpected unless you expect it; for it is hard to
find, and difficult.
10.
Nature loves to hide.
20.
This world that is the same for all, neither any god nor any man shaped
it, but it ever was and is and shall be everliving Fire that kindles by
measures and goes out by measures.
21.
The changed states of Fire are, first, sea; half of sea is earth, and half
is stormcloud.
22.
All things are exchanged for Fire and Fire for all things, as goods for
gold and gold for goods.
24.
Fire is want and satiety.
25.
Fire lives the death of Air, and Air the death of Fire; Water lives the
death of Earth, and Earth of Water.
26.
Fire advancing upon all things shall judge them and convict them.
28.
It is the thunderbolt that steers all things.
29.
The sun shall not transgress his measures; if he does, the Erinnyes, the
supporters of justice, will find him out.
32.
The sun is new every day.
34
. . . . the seasons that bear all things.
35.
Hesiod is the teacher of many. They believe that he knew a great many
things, that man, who did not know day and night! They are one.
36.
God is day, he is night; winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and
hunger; he changes form even as Fire when mixed with various incenses is
named according to the pleasant perfume of each.
37.
If all things turned into smoke, the nostrils would distinguish them.
38.
Souls smell in Hades.
39.
Cold things grow warm, what is warm chills; the moist dries, the dry
dampens.
40.
It scatters and comes together, approaches and goes away.
41.
You could not step twice in the same rivers; for other and yet other
waters are ever flowing on.
43.
[And Heraclitus blames Homer for saying: “Would that strife were to
vanish from among gods and men.” For then everything would vanish.] For
there could be no harmony without high and deep tones, no animals without
male and female; and these are opposites.
44.
War is the father and king of all things; he has shown some to be gods and
some mortals, he has made some slaves and others free.
45.
Men do not understand how what is divided is consistent with itself, it is
a harmony of tensions like that of the bow and the lyre.
46.
Opposition is good; the fairest harmony comes out of
differents; everything originates in strife.
47.
Hidden harmony is better than apparent harmony.
48.
Let us not make guesses at random about the greatest things.
50.
The way of the carding-comb, both straight and crooked, is one and the
same.
56.
The harmony of the world is of tensions, like that of the bow and the
lyre.
57-58.
And good and evil are the same. Thus physicians,
cutting and cauterizing and torturing sick men in every way,
yet complain that they do not get as much pay as they deserve from
the sick men; for what they do is good for those diseases.
60.
They would not have known the name of justice had not these things [unjust
actions] occurred.
61.
All things are fair and good and right to God; but men think of some as
wrong and others as right.
62.
One must know that war is common to all, and that strife is justice; and
all things both come to pass and perish through strife.
66.
The name of the bow (Bios)
is life (Bios),
but its work is death.
67.
Immortals are mortal, mortals immortal, each living the death and dying
the life of the other.
68.
It is death for souls to become water, and it is death for water to become
earth; but water has its origin from earth, and souls from water.
69.
The way up and the way down are one and the same.
70.
The beginning and the end of a circle’s circumference are common.
78.
The living and the dead, the waking and sleeping, the young and the old,
these are the same; the former are moved about and become the latter, the
latter in turn become the former.
79.
A lifetime is a child playing at draughts; the power of a king is a
child’s.
80.
I have sought myself out.
81.
In the same rivers we step and we do not step. We are and are not.
83.
By changing it rests.
85.
Corpses should be cast out sooner than dung.
104.
It would not be better if men were to get all they wish for. Disease makes
health pleasant and good; hunger, satiety; and weariness, rest.
111.
What mind or wit is in them? They follow after the poets and take the mob
as a teacher, not knowing that many are bad and few good. For the best of
them fix upon one thing above all others, that is, everlasting fame among
men, but the greater part are satisfied the way beasts are.
114.
It would be right for all the Ephesians above age to strangle themselves
and leave the city to those below age; for they cast out Hermodorus, the
best man among them, saying: “Let
no man among us be the best; if there is one, let it be elsewhere and
among others.”
115.
Dogs bark at the man they do not know.
118.
The most esteemed of them knows only semblances;
and surely justice will overtake the fabricators of lies and the
false witnesses.
119.
Homer deserves to be thrown out of the lists and whipped, and so does
Archilochus.
122.
There await men when they die such things as they
do not expect, or think of.
125.
For the mysteries recognized by men are celebrated
in an unholy fashion.
126.
And they pray to these statues like a man chattering
to his own house, knowing nothing of gods or heroes or what they
are.
127. For if it were not to Dionysus that they held the procession and chanted the ode with the phallic symbols, their actions would be most shameless; for Dionysus, in whose honor they revel and keep the Lenaean festival, is the same as Hades.