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Empedocles Quotes
490 BC–430 BC Greece
Empedocles (c. 490 BC – c. 430 BC) was a poet, statesman, and pre-Socratic philosopher from the Greek colony of Agrigentum in Sicily. Two of his philosophical verse texts, On Nature and Purifications, survived antiquity in fragmentary form; these fragments comprise the only works considered to be of genuine Empedoclean authorship.
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17 quotes
Blessed is he who has acquired a wealth of divine wisdom, but miserable is he in whom there rests a dim opinion concerning the gods.
But what is lawful for all extends across wide-ruling aether and, without cease, through endless sunshine.
Nothing of the All is either empty or superfluous.
For already, sometime, I have been a boy and a girl, a shrub, a bird, and a silent fish in the sea.
From such honor and such a height of fortune am I, thus fallen to earth, cast down amongst mortals.
Fools -- for their thoughts are not well-considered who suppose that not-being exists or that anything dies and is wholly annihilated.
Fortunate is he who has acquired a wealth of divine understanding, but wretched the one whose interest lies in shadowy conjectures about divinities.
What needs [saying] is worth saying twice.
With deep roots Ether plunged into earth.
Hear first the four roots of all things: shining Zeus, life-bringing Hera, Aidoneus, and Nestis, who wets with tears the mortal wellspring.
For one by one did quake the limbs of God.
As it has long been and shall be, not ever, I think, will unfathomable time be emptied of either.
The sight of both [eyes] becomes one.
And I will tell you something else: there is no birth of all mortal things, nor any end in wretched death, but only a mixing and dissolution of mixtures; 'birth' is so called on the part of mankind.
These [Elements] never cease changing place continually, now being all united by Love into one, now each borne apart by the hatred engendered of Strife, until they are brought together in the unity of the all, and become subject to it.
But, when the elements have been mingled in the fashion of a man and come to the light of day, or in the fashion of the race of wild beasts or plants or birds, then men say that these come into being; and when they are separated, they call that woeful death. They call it not aright; but I too follow the custom, and call it so myself.
The earth's sweat, the sea.
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