"Empedocles" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unknown head that shows for an instant through the wave, and drag it out to 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... 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 ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... descriptive passage encumbered the action at the moment of crisis. I liked 'The Shadow of the Glen' better than 'Riders to the Sea' that is, for all the nobility of its end, its mood of Greek tragedy, too passive in suffering; and had quoted from Matthew Arnold's introduction to 'Empedocles on Etna,' Synge answered, 'It is a curious thing that "The Riders to the Sea" succeeds with an English but not with an Irish audience, and "The Shadow of the Glen" which is not liked by an English audience is always liked in Ireland, though it is disliked ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... essential harmony with the Old, and also with those ancient philosophers who preceded Plato. Lucullus, therefore, reproves him as a rebel in philosophy, who appeals to great and ancient names like a seditious tribune[263]. Unfair use had been made, according to Lucullus, of Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Parmenides, Xenophanes, Plato, and Socrates[264]. But Cicero did not merely give a historical summary. He must have dealt with the theory of [Greek: kataleptike phantasia] and [Greek: ennoiai] (which ...
— Academica • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... vision, a theory, [149] theoria, which reposes on no basis of unverified hypothesis, which makes no call upon a future after all somewhat problematic; as it would be unaffected by any discovery of an Empedocles (improving on the old story of Prometheus) as to what had really been the origin, and course of development, of man's actually attained faculties and that seemingly divine particle of reason or spirit in him. Such a doctrine, at more leisurable moments, would of course have its precepts to deliver ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... considered the demons to be well-intentioned. Homer (c. 1000 B. C.) speaks frequently of demons, and in one instance in the Odyssey tells of a sick man pining away, "one upon whom a hateful demon had gazed." Empedocles (c. 490-430 B. C.) taught that demons "were of a mixed and inconstant nature, and are subjected to a purgatorial process which may finally end in their ascension to higher abodes." Yet he attributed to them nearly all the calamities, vexations, and ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... form, and this form only, did the thought of eternity pass before the mind of Heraclitus and other Greek sages. There was no question with them of a continuance of the immediate personality after death. Compare some verses of Empedocles (B.C. 490-430). He says of those who accept the data of ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... that entitles them all indiscriminately to the name. Even when a treatise on medicine or natural science is brought out in verse, the name of poet is by custom given to the author; and yet Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common but the metre, so that it would be right to call the one poet, the other physicist rather than poet. On the same principle, even if a writer in his poetic imitation were to combine all metres, as Chaeremon did in his Centaur, which is a ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... in danger of sudden arrest, without bail. Editors, certain ones who crow like cockerels. Edwards, Jonathan. Eggs, bad, the worst sort of. Egyptian darkness, phial of, use for. Eldorado, Mr. Sawin sets sail for. Elizabeth, Queen, mistake of her ambassador. Emerson. Emilius, Paulus. Empedocles. Employment, regular, a good thing. Enfield's Speaker, abuse of. England, late Mother-Country, her want of tact, merits as a lecturer, her real greatness not to be forgotten, not contented (unwisely) with her own stock of fools, natural maker of international law, her theory thereof, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... explanation of the causation of the remarkable exceptions to the rules of prolificity was similar to that advanced by Empedocles, who says that the greater the quantity of semen, the greater the number of children at birth. Pare, later, uses a similar reason to explain the causation of monstrosities, grouping them into two classes, those due ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... noted Hebrew thinkers, Philo, Maimonides, and Spinoza, was—given God, to account for creation; and this he tried to do by means of Neo-Platonic Aristotelianism, such as he found in the Pseudo-Pythagoras, Pseudo-Empedocles, Pseudo-Aristotelian 'Theology' (an abstract from Plotinus), and 'Book on Causes' (an abstract from Proclus's 'Institutio Theologica'). It is well known that Aristotle, who made God a "thinking of thinking," and placed matter, as something eternal, over against him, never ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... embodies Knowledge is no proof of their actually then exercising it, because they who are under the operation of these passions repeat demonstrations; or verses of Empedocles, just as children, when first learning, string words together, but as yet know nothing of their meaning, because they must grow into it, and this is a process requiring time: so that we must suppose these men who fail ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... EMPEDOCLES, one of Pythagoras's scholars, who threw himself secretly into the crater at Etna, that people might suppose the gods had carried him to heaven; but alas! one of his iron pattens was cast out ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... Empedocles, one of the early disciples of Pythagoras, said that he inhabited a female body in his preceding existence. Saint Clement of Alexandria quotes a few lines of his, in which we find the philosopher of Agrigentum teaching the general evolution ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... by the necessities of metre and rhythm. They may, indeed, resort to blank verse, which is a sort of half-way house between prose and rhyme, as was done by Mr. Leonard in his excellent translation of Empedocles, of which the ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... gives way; A pleasant promise, wafted from her shores, Comes o'er my heart: in fancy I behold 430 Her seas yet smiling, her once happy vales; Nor can my tongue give utterance to a name Of note belonging to that honoured isle, Philosopher or Bard, Empedocles, [P] Or Archimedes, [Q] pure abstracted soul! 435 That doth not yield a solace to my grief: And, O Theocritus, [R] so far have some Prevailed among the powers of heaven and earth, By their endowments, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... view aided 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 Greek freedom ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... the existence of ultimate elementary particles, as Empedocles did, from the combinations whereof all material phenomena resulted. But he asserted the Moving Force to be Mind; and yet, though he clearly saw the impossibility of advancing by illustration or definition beyond a reasonable faith, or a simple negation of materiality, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... four elements which, though ultimate for us, yet were produced in the beginning by God and are destined some day to be reabsorbed into the divine nature. These with the Stoics were the same which had been accepted since Empedocles—namely earth, air, fire and water. The elements, like the two first principles were bodies; unlike them, they were declared to have shape as ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... Empedocles, ardeatem frigidus aetnam Infiluit. sit fas, liceatque perire poetis. Invitum qui fervat, idem facit occidenti. Nec semel hoc fecit; nec si retractus erit jam, Fiet homo, et ponet famosae mortis amorem. Nec fatis apparet, cur versus factitet; ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... is replete with brilliant passages, and contains some of Arnold's best lyric verses and most beautiful nature pictures; but the dialogue is colorless, the rhymes poor, the plot, such as it contains, but indifferently handled, and even Empedocles, the principal character, is frequently tedious and unnatural. Arnold's dramas show that his forte was not ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... this revolution in which now revolve the stars and the sun and the moon and the air and the aether that are separated off."[3] This, however, amounts to no argument, and it is extremely doubtful whether Anaxagoras ever meant anything more by his Nous than Empedocles did by his Love and Strife, of which it was the historical successor, and we may safely, I think, endorse the judgment of Aristotle when he says that "Anaxagoras, also, employs mind as a machine" (i.e., as the Laurentian MS. indicates, as a ...
— The Basis of Early Christian Theism • Lawrence Thomas Cole
... is the author of a celebrated poem, in six books, De Rerum Natura; a subject which had been treated many ages before by Empedocles, a philosopher and poet of Agrigentum. Lucretius was a zealous partizan of Democritus, and the sect of Epicurus, whose principles concerning the eternity of matter, the materiality of the soul, and the non-existence ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... efficacy of images and other sacred objects, and especially in connexion with Orphic and other Mysteries. And, while for the most part Greek philosophy was rather imaginative than mystic, still we encounter the genuine mystic element in such Greek sages as Empedocles and Pythagoras, both of whom assumed the priestly character and seem to have laid claim to supernatural powers. Empedocles indeed, it is said, gave himself out to be a deity exiled from heaven, and was apparently worshipped ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... the sapient throng, Seated amid the philosophic train. Him all admire, all pay him rev'rence due. There Socrates and Plato both I mark'd, Nearest to him in rank; Democritus, Who sets the world at chance, Diogenes, With Heraclitus, and Empedocles, And Anaxagoras, and Thales sage, Zeno, and Dioscorides well read In nature's secret lore. Orpheus I mark'd And Linus, Tully and moral Seneca, Euclid and Ptolemy, Hippocrates, Galenus, Avicen, and him who made That ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... 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 succeeded) ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... sufficiently refuted by the best pens: but I must not omit to warn you that the name of magic has been used in a good sense for any uncommon science, and a sublimer sort of philosophy. It is in this sense that it must be understood where Pliny says,[674] although rather obscurely, "that Pythagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, and Plato, traveled a great deal to acquire instruction in it." For the rest, people are naturally led to attribute to sorcery everything that appears new and marvelous. Have not we ourselves, with M. Leguier, passed for magicians in the minds of some persons, ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... thinking that they call them poets not by reason of the imitative nature of their work, but indiscriminately by reason of the metre they write in. Even if a theory of medicine or physical philosophy be put forth in a metrical form, it is usual to describe the writer in this way; Homer and Empedocles, however, have really nothing in common apart from their metre; so that, if the one is to be called a poet, the other should be termed a physicist rather than a poet. We should be in the same position also, if the imitation in these instances ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... directed against their conduct at certain points. Hence the 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 ultimate ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... strictly morphological note is struck by a curious saying of Empedocles (4th century B.C.), that "hair and foliage and the thick plumage of birds ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... libraries; and this curious youth, in that age of restored letters, read eagerly, easily, and very soon came to the kernel of a difficult old author—Plotinus or Plato; to the purpose of thinkers older still, surviving by glimpses only in the books of others—Empedocles, Pythagoras, who had enjoyed the original divine sense of things, above all, Parmenides, that most ancient assertor of God's identity with the world. The affinities, the unity, of the visible and the invisible, of earth and heaven, of all things whatever, with each other, through the consciousness, ...
— Giordano Bruno • Walter Horatio Pater
... writings—and they are too few—know that he concerned himself, directly or indirectly, with philosophic problems. But he never wrote philosophy; his methods were not those of logic; and his sympathies were with science and the arts. In the early age of Greece he might have been Empedocles or Heraclitus; he could never have been Spinoza or Kant. He sought to interpret life, but not merely in terms of the intellect. He needed to see and feel in order to think. And he expressed himself in a style too intellectual for lovers of poetry, too metaphorical for lovers of ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... vain exploit, though then renownd: The builders next of Babel on the Plain Of Sennaar, and still with vain designe New Babels, had they wherewithall, would build: Others came single; hee who to be deemd A God, leap'd fondly into Aetna flames, 470 Empedocles, and hee who to enjoy Plato's Elysium, leap'd into the Sea, Cleombrotus, and many more too long, Embryo's and Idiots, Eremits and Friers White, Black and Grey, with all thir trumperie. Here Pilgrims roam, that stray'd so farr to seek In Golgotha him dead, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton |
