Heraclitus Quotes

I love to have contrast.

The unlike is joined together, and from differences results the most beautiful harmony.

God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger.

To seek, beneath the universal strife, the hidden harmony of things.

Discord gives a relish for concord.

The fairest harmony springs from discord.

Harmony exists no less in difference than in likeness, if only the same key-note govern both parts.

I finally discovered the source of all movement, the unity from which all diversities of movement are born.

All nature's diff'rence keeps all nature's peace.

All concord's born of contraries.

Sameness leaves us in peace but it is contradiction that makes us productive.

"If we had not created a set of people against another the world would have been corrupt", and "against" here means two things: Against in the fact that they are challenging you with their diversity, challenging your intelligence and to challenge is not negative, it can be very positive depending on how you are challenged.

The unifying of opposites is the eternal process.

Basic characteristics of an individual organism: to divide, to unite, to merge into the universal, to abide in the particular, to transform itself, to define itself, and as living things tend to appear under a thousand conditions, to arise and vanish, to solidify and melt, to freeze and flow, to expand and contract. Since these effects occur together, any or all may occur at the same moment.

As unity demanded for its expression what at first might have seemed its opposite--variety; so repose demands for its expression the implied capability of its opposite--energy. It is the most unfailing test of beauty; nothing can be ignoble that possesses it, nothing right that has it not.

Tension of opposites.

An enlightened person is the richest person possible, but his richness comes from surrender, not from fight. He does not... he has not any conflict with the whole. He has fallen in harmony, he is in a harmonia.

A holy person is someone who is whole; who has, as it were, reconciled his opposites.

At first glance, the key and the lock it fits may seem very different," Sazed said. "Different in shape, different in function, different in design. The man who looks at them without knowledge of their true nature might think them opposites, for one is meant to open, and the other to keep closed. Yet, upon closer examination he might see that without one, the other becomes useless. The wise man then sees that both lock and key were created for the same purpose.

The rose and thorn, the treasure and dragon, joy and sorrow, all mingle into one.

We are now at the point where we must decide whether we are to honour the concept of a plural society which gains strength through diversity, or whether we are to have bitter fragmentation that will result in perpetual tension and strife.

If a union is to take place between opposites like spirit and matter, conscious and unconscious, bright and dark, and so on, it will happen in a third thing, which represents not a compromise but something new.

The way of mutual strife and exclusiveness is the only way to perdition and slavery.

Unity in variety is the plan of the universe.

[Nature's] crown is Love. Only through Love can we come near her. She puts gulfs between all things, and all things strive to be interfused. She isolates everything, that she may draw everything together. With a few draughts from the cup of Love she repays for a life full of trouble.