Democritus Quotes

The first principles of the universe are atoms and empty space; everything else is merely thought to exist.

Contemporary science is based on the philosophy of materialism, which claims that all reality is material or physical.

The foregoing considerations lead us to the very important conclusion, that matter is essentially force, and nothing but force; that matter, as popularly understood, does not exist, and is, in fact, philosophically inconceivable.

We might be allowed to... assert that because our only cognitions of matter are cognitions of force, matter in the scientific sense is force.

Nothing exists but atoms and the void.

If we are merely matter intricately assembled, is this really demeaning? If there's nothing here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?

Thing, body, matter, are nothing apart from the combinations of the elements, - the colours, sounds, and so forth - nothing apart from their so-called attributes.

Common sense says that chairs and tables exist independently of whether anyone happens to perceive them or not.

But even physics cannot be defined from an atomic topography.

We are assuming that we exist, that there is reality, and that the matter of which we are made is real.

A cold atheistical materialism is the tendency of the so-called material philosophy of the present day.

The mind of man has perplexed itself with many hard questions. Is space infinite, and in what sense? Is the material world infinite in extent, and are all places within that extent equally full of matter? Do atoms exist or is matter infinitely divisible?

The majority of the world is empty space. Empty space, empty space, empty space. All that we see in the world, the life, the animals, plants, people - it's all empty space. That's amazing!

If all of this, all the life of a stream of water, can be nothing but a pile of atoms, how much more is possible?

All you are is a bag of particles acting out the laws of physics. That to me is pretty clear.

Thought is matter as much as the floor, the wall, the telephone, are matter.

Naturalism and materialism mean essentially the same thing.

The most consistent versions of materialism deny the reality of anything beyond matter - no soul, no spirit, no will, no mind. This is called reductionism: Humans are reduced to biochemical machines.

Matter and energy seem granular in structure, and so does “life”, but not so mind.

Body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body.

There is no place in this new kind of physics both for the field and matter, for the field is the only reality.

One way of saying that is that there is an objective reality beyond our mind. A way to think of this in a philosophic sense is to look between the two great extremes: the idealist philosophy that says mind and consciousness is the only thing and that matter is simply an illusion, or a Maya, the product of mind; and the other extreme, a strict materialist determinism, which says that mind and consciousness is a secondary phenomenon of the collision of matter.

Atoms are mainly empty space. Matter is composed chiefly of nothing.

In our daily lives we attend primarily to that which the senses are spelling out for us: to what the eyes perceive, to what the fingers touch. Reality to us is thinghood , consisting of substances that occupy space; even God is conceived by most of us as a thing. The result of our thinginess is our blindness to all reality that fails to identify itself as a thing, as a matter of fact.

The first dogma which I came to disbelieve was that of free will. It seemed to me that all notions of matter were determined by the laws of dynamics and could not therefore be influenced by human wills.