Empedocles (/ɛmˈpɛdəkliːz/; Greek: Ἐμπεδοκλῆς [empedoklɛ̂ːs], Empedoklēs; c. 494 – c. 434 BC, fl. 444–443 BC) was a poet, statesman, and pre-Socratic philosopher and a native citizen of Akragas, a Greek city in Sicily. Empedocles' philosophy is best known for originating the cosmogonic theory of the four classical elements. He also proposed forces he called Love and Strife which would mix and separate the elements, respectively.
Influenced by Pythagoras (died c. 495 BC) and the Pythagoreans, Empedocles challenged the practice of animal sacrifice and killing animals for food. He developed a distinctive doctrine of reincarnation. He is generally considered the last Greek philosopher to have recorded his ideas in verse. Some of his work survives (On Nature and Purifications), more than is the case for any other pre-Socratic philosopher. Empedocles' death was mythologized by ancient writers, and has been the subject of a number of literary treatments.
Empedocles's Quotes:
- “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.”
- “For already, sometime, I have been a boy and a girl, a shrub, a bird, and a silent fish in the sea.”
- “Each man believes only his experience.”
- “What needs [saying] is worth saying twice.”
- “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.”
- “At one time through love all things come together into one, at another time through strife s hatred, they are borne each of them apart.”
- “The force that unites all the elements to be all things is love, also called Aphrodite. Love unites different elements in a unit to become a composite thing. Love is the same force that human beings find in work whenever they feel joy, love, and peace. The struggle, on the other hand, is the force responsible for the dissolution.”
- “The sea is the sweat of the earth.”
- “We see the earth through the earth, the water through the water, the divine air through the air, and the fire that destroys the fire. We understand the love for love and hatred for hatred.”
- “Iris from sea brings wind or mighty rain.”
- “The nature of God is a circle whose center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.”
- “No mortal thing has a beginning or end in death destruction; there is only a mixture and separation of the mixed, but for mortal men, these processes are called ‘beginnings’.”
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