Empedocles

Empedocles (c. 490 BC - 430 BC) was a Greek thinker and philosopher of Agrigentum, in Sicily, "extolled in antiquity as a statesman and orator, as physicist, physician, and poet, and even as prophet and worker of miracles," who flourished about the year 440 BC. He conceived the universe as made up of "four eternal, self-subsistent, mutually underivative, but divisible, primal material bodies, mingled and moulded by two moving forces, the uniting one of friendship and the disuniting one of strife".

It is fabled of him that, to persuade his fellow-citizens, with whom he had been in high favour as their deliverer from the tyranny of the aristocracy, of his bodily translation from earth to heaven, he threw himself unseen into the crater of Etna, but that at the next eruption of the mountain his slipper was cast up and revealed the fraud.

Wisdom & Quotes

• God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

- Fragments

• Each man believes only his experience.
• Blessed is he who has acquired a wealth of divine wisdom, but miserable he in whom there rests a dim opinion concerning the gods.
• None of the gods has formed the world, nor has any man, it has always been.
• No mortal thing has a beginning, nor does it end in death and obliteration; there is only a mixing and then separating of what was mixed, but by mortal men these processes are named "beginnings.”
• The force that unites the elements to become all things is Love, also called Aphrodite; Love brings together dissimilar elements into a unity, to become a composite thing. Love is the same force that human beings find at work in themselves whenever they feel joy, love and peace. Strife, on the other hand, is the force responsible for the dissolution of the one back into its many, the four elements of which it was composed.
• But come, hear my words, for truly learning causes the mind to grow. For as I said before in declaring the ends of my words: Twofold is the truth I shall speak; for at one time there grew to be the one alone out of many, and at another time it separated so that there were many out of the one; fire and water and earth and boundless height of air, and baneful Strife apart from these, balancing each of them, and Love among them, their equal in length and breadth.
• There are forces in nature called Love and Hate. The force of Love causes elements to be attracted to each other and to be built up into some particular form or person, and the force of Hate causes the decomposition of things.
• It was not the mixture, O men, of blood and breath that made the beginning and substance of your souls, though your earthborn and mortal body is framed of those things. But your soul has come hither from another place.
• Having glimpsed a small part of life, men rise up and disappear as smoke, knowing only what each one has learned.
• What is lawful is not binding only on some and not binding on others. Lawfulness extends everywhere, through the wide-ruling air and the boundless light of the sky.
• There is an utterance of Necessity, an ancient decree of the gods, eternal, sealed fast with broad oaths: whenever any one defiles his body sinfully with bloody gore or perjures himself in regard to wrong-doing, one of those spirits who are heir to long life, thrice ten thousand seasons shall he wander apart from the blessed, being born meantime in all sorts of mortal forms, changing one bitter path of life for another.
• 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.
• Fools — for their thoughts are not well-considered who suppose that not-being exists or that anything dies and is wholly annihilated.
• Nothing of the All is either empty or superfluous.

Euripides