Anaxagoras Quotes

The Greeks are wrong to recognize coming into being and perishing; for nothing comes into being nor perishes, but is rather compounded or dissolved from things that are. So they would be right to call coming into being composition and perishing dissolution.

Wrongly do the Greeks suppose that aught begins or ceases to be; for nothing comes into being or is destroyed; but all is an aggregation or secretion of preexisting things; so that all becoming might more correctly be called becoming mixed, and all corruption, becoming separate.

[Heraclitus] concluded that coming-to-be itself could not be anything evil or unjust.

We must wish either for that which actually exists or for that which cannot in any way exist or, still better, for both. That which is and that which cannot be are both outside the realm of becoming.

I think, therefore I am.

Doesn't becoming imply time?

The world, the real is not an object. It is a process.

Metaphysics is a science.

Einstein said, if everything exists as a substance of qualities, and qualities exist only in mind, then all is mind.

First, philosophy concerns itself with all kinds of issues that don't get much airtime in day-to-day life. What's the nature of reality? Can we ever truly know anything, and if so, how? What does it mean to be a moral agent? And while we're at it, is there any such thing as agency anyway?

We do not say: Being is, time is, but rather: there is Being and there is time.

The greatest mystery of existence is existence itself.

Human beings are not capable of creating a thought that truly conceives of this existence. Nobody knows if we are really here, alive, or anything. It's a mystery.

'Do not touch ontologically' doesn't mean 'are separated by empirically measurable hard edges.'

What is meant by cause? Cause is the fine state of the manifested state.

To say that the universe exists is silly, because it says that the universe is one of the things in the universe. So there's something wrong with questions like, "What caused the Universe to exist?"

Nothing proceeds from nothingness, as also nothing passes away into non-existence.

Existence is not a mystery unless you think it has a meaning.

I don't think anything might have been. What is, is.

Metaphysics,--the science which determines what can and what cannot be known of being and the laws of being.

Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.

Metaphysics must be based on what exists, for it has the task of explicating it.

Nothing is, everything is becoming.

I stick my finger into existence.. it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean?

The only roads of enquiry there are to think of: one, that it is and that it is not possible for it not to be, this is the path of persuasion (for truth is its companion); the other, that it is not and that it must not be - this I say to you is a path wholly unknowable.