Heraclitus

c. 540 - c. 480 BCE · Greek (Ephesian) · Presocratic metaphysics

Nature loves to hide.

At the end of the sixth century BCE, an aristocrat from Ephesus renounced his hereditary title, withdrew from civic life, and deposited a book in the temple of Artemis — deliberately obscure, contemptuous of polymaths and sleepwalkers. Roughly 125 fragments survive in quotations by Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and later Christian writers.

Topics Heraclitus addresses

• the logos
• all things are one
• the unity of opposites
• the everliving fire
• fire kindled in measures and going out in measures
• the hidden harmony
• the bow and the lyre
• the way up and the way down
• the river fragments
• panta rhei and universal flux
• elemental transformations
• the ungenerated and indestructible kosmos
• polemos as father of all
• the depth of the psyche
• the dry soul
• ethos anthropoi daimon
• nature loves to hide
• the Delphic oracle that gives a sign
• sleep and waking
• eyes and ears as witnesses
• polymathie does not teach insight
• the wise one
• mortal-immortal exchange
• stability through change

Converse with Heraclitus on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Heraclitus's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.