"Empedocles" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his native city (circa 440 B.C.) it was one of the wealthiest and most powerful communities in that wealthy and powerful island. It had, however, been infested, like its neighbours, by the designs of tyrants and the dissensions of rival factions. Empedocles was a man of high family, and he exercised the influence which his position and his abilities secured him in promoting and maintaining the liberty of his fellow-countrymen. Partly on this account, ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... personal recognition and a share in our own sempiternal buoyancy! Go and be photographed on the edge of Niagara, O unknown aspirant for human remembrance! Do not throw yourself, O traveller, into Etna, like Empedocles, but be taken by the camera standing on the edge of the crater! Who is that lady in the carriage at the door of Burns's cottage? Who is that gentleman in the shiny hat on the sidewalk in front of the Shakspeare house? Who are those two fair ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... doubtless in giving germs of a better evolution theory to the early Greeks. Anaximander, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and, greatest of all, Aristotle, as we have seen, developed them, making their way at times by guesses toward truths since established by observation. Aristotle especially, both by speculation and observation, arrived at some results which, had ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... by Xenophanes of Colophon. Driven by the Persian invasion of 546 B.C. to earn his living as a wandering minstrel, he developed the ideas of Anaximander, and founded the school of great philosophic poets, to which Parmenides, Empedocles and Lucretius belong. He is the grand monotheist, and he has published his doctrines in ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... external and supernal; thus we call the upper frame of a door [Greek omitted], and the upper portion of the house [Greek omitted]; and the poet calls the outward parts of the victim the upper-flesh, as he calls the entrails the inner-flesh. Let us see therefore, says he, whether Empedocles did not make use of this epithet in this sense, seeing that other fruits are encompassed with an outward rind and with certain coatings and membranes, but the only cortex rind that the apple has is a glutinous and ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... members of each group tend to appear, at least in part, as varieties of one species; the radical differences of the two species are emphasized in broad hard strokes; and the two are set in conflict, almost as if Shakespeare, like Empedocles, were regarding Love and Hate as the two ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... and evening star, of the sun, the planets, and the moon. And the differences in perfection of organization, he attributed to the different proportions in which the primary principles were intermingled. The ultimate principle of the world was, in his view, necessity, in which Empedocles appears to have followed him; he seems to have been the only philosopher who recognised with distinctness and precision that the Existent, {GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU}{GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... original elements—fire, air, earth, water. Anaximander held that animals were begotten from the earth by means of heat and moisture; and that man was developed from other beings different in form. Empedocles had a fantastic theory, viz., that the various parts of man and animals at first existed independently, and that these—for instance, arms, legs, feet, eyes, etc., gradually combined—perhaps after the manner in which automobiles ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... side of the angels"—the heroine, another divine little peasant-girl—who, if George Sand had been fond of series-titles, might have caused the book to be named La Petite Marie—omits any, however slightly, "horrid" stage altogether. She is, if not "the whole" good—which, as Empedocles said long ago, few can boast to find,—good, and nothing but good, except pretty, and other things which are parts or forms of goodness. The piece really is, in the proper sense which so few people know, or at least use, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... earlier and ruder world coming to us "breathed softly through the flutes of the Grecians." But even the Grecian flute, as in the lay of the strife of Apollo and Marsyas, comes more tunably in the echo of Mr. Arnold's song, that beautiful song in "Empedocles on Etna," which has the perfection of sculpture and the charm of the purest colour. It is full of the silver light of dawn among the hills, of the music of the loch's dark, slow waves among the reeds, of the scent of the heather, and the ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... wax to handle, And fashion'd from it many a candle. Of these, one, seeing clay, made brick by fire, Remain uninjured by the teeth of time, Was kindled into great desire For immortality sublime. And so this new Empedocles Upon the blazing pile one sees, Self-doom'd by purest folly To fate so melancholy. The candle lack'd philosophy: All things are made diverse to be. To wander from our destined tracks— There cannot be a vainer wish; But this Empedocles of wax, That melted in ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... her books in vain to feudal Europe. In vain, because the time was not yet. The ideas projected thus early on the modern world were immature and abortive, like those headless trunks and zoophytic members of half-moulded humanity which, in the vision of Empedocles, preceded the birth of full-formed man. The nations were not ready. Franciscans imprisoning Roger Bacon for venturing to examine what God had meant to keep secret; Dominicans preaching crusades against ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... American formula was well phrased by the late Samuel Patch, the Western Empedocles, 'Some things can be done as well as others.' A homely utterance, but it has virtue to overthrow all dynasties and hierarchies. These were all built up on the Old-World dogma that some things can NOT be ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... did so notably show itself that the philosophers of Greece durst not a long time appear to the world but under the mask of poets; so Thales, Empedocles, and Parmenides sang their natural philosophy in verses; so did Pythagoras and Phocylides their moral counsels; so did Tyrtaeus in war matters; and Solon in matters of policy; or rather they, being poets, did exercise their delightful vein in those ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... culture of his fuller century when multiplied sciences force a scholar to be content with one segment of human knowledge. The former had music and architecture and other sciences among his accomplishments; the latter spread out in literature, as "Sohrab and Rustum," "Empedocles on Etna," "Tristram and Iseult," as well as "Balder Dead" attest. The quatrain prefixed to the volume containing the narrative and elegiac poems be-tokens what joy Arnold had in his literary work, and indicates why these poems cannot fail ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... his master by showing the absurdities involved in the ideas of variety and of creation, as opposed to one and universal substance. Other philosophers belonging to Iona or Elea may be referred to these schools, as Heraclitus, Empedocles, Democritus, and Anaxagoras, whose doctrines, however, vary from those of the representatives of the philosophical systems above named. Heraclitus (fl. 505 B.C.) dealt rather in intimations of important truths than in popular exposition of them; his cardinal doctrine seems to have been that everything ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... larger scope. Thus it includes the epigram on the Lacedaemonian mother who killed her son for returning alive from an unsuccessful battle;[2] that celebrating the magnificence of the tomb of Semiramis;[3] that questioning the story as to the leap of Empedocles into Etna;[4] and a large number which might equally well come under the next head, being eulogies on ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... interesting, impersonal, scientific account of what happened after my flight. Her testimony was all the more valuable in that she was, as she said, only 'psychologically interested.' She reminded me that Empedocles is said to have recalled a young woman from death by the same means, i.e., the insistent repetition of her name; which proved to Miss Ransome that the poor old ancients had 'anticipated, though of course unscientifically, some of the principles ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... endeavours to put into myths felt to be irrational and impious a meaning which does not offend either piety or reason. We may therefore conclude that it was not men in an early stage of philosophic thought (as philosophy is now understood)—not men like Empedocles and Heraclitus, nor reasonably devout men like Eumaeus, the pious swineherd of the Odyssey—who evolved the blasphemous myths of Greece, of Egypt and of India. We must look elsewhere for an explanation. We must try to discover ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... his own battered claw; "thank you. But why should we run only to modern authorities? All great inventions, all great ideas, have been present to men's minds and hopes from the beginning of civilization. Did not Empedocles forestall Mr. Darwin, and hit out, at a stroke, the ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... aside as pure fable the stories of the winged horse of Perseus, and the flights of Hermes as messenger of the gods. With them may be placed the story of Empedocles, who failed to take Etna seriously enough, and found himself caught by an eruption while within the crater, so that, flying to safety in some hurry, he left behind but one sandal to attest that he had sought refuge in space—in all probability, if he escaped at all, he flew, ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... flesh-eating as little better than cannibalism. The Pythagorean and the Orphic rules of life were well known throughout antiquity, and were probably obeyed by large numbers. The rule of continence was far less strict than in the Catholic 'religious' life; but Empedocles, according to Hippolytus, advised abstinence from marriage and procreation, and the tendency to regard celibacy as part of the 'philosophic life' increased steadily. The Cynic Antisthenes is quoted by Clement of Alexandria as having expressed a wish ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... the sea, what rules the year, whether the stars spontaneously or by direction wander about and are erratic, what throws obscurity on the moon, and what brings out her orb, what is the intention and power of the jarring harmony of things, whether Empedocles or the clever Stertinius be in ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... operation of Circumstantial Selection simultaneously with Charles. The celebrated Buffoon was a better Evolutionist than either of them; and two thousand years before Buffon was born, the Greek philosopher Empedocles opined that all forms of life are transformations of four elements, Fire, Air, Earth, and Water, effected by the two innate forces of attraction and repulsion, or love and hate. As lately as 1860 I myself ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... evolution is very ancient. In his admirable sketch From the Greeks to Darwin,[1] Prof. Osborn has shown that several of the ancient philosophers looked upon Nature as a gradual development and as still in process of change. In the suggestions of Empedocles, to take the best instance, there were "four sparks of truth,—first, that the development of life was a gradual process; second, that plants were evolved before animals; third, that imperfect forms were gradually replaced (not ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... Eleatic philosophers is doubtfully closed by the name of Empedocles of Agrigentum, who in legend almost rivals Pythagoras. In the East he learned medicine and magic, the art of working miracles, of producing rain and wind. He decked himself in priestly garments, a golden ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... third; and neither the two boys nor Socrates are satisfied with any of the three or with all of them. Socrates turns to the poets, who affirm that God brings like to like (Homer), and to philosophers (Empedocles), who also assert that like is the friend of like. But the bad are not friends, for they are not even like themselves, and still less are they like one another. And the good have no need of one another, and therefore do not care about one ...
— Lysis • Plato |
