Democritus Quotes - Page 4

Coition is a slight attack of apoplexy. For man gushes forth from man, and is separated by being torn apart with a kind of blow.

Poor mind, from the senses you take your arguments, and then want to defeat them? Your victory is your defeat.

In a shared fish, there are no bones.

To speak but little becomes a woman; and she is best adorned who is in plain attire.

I am the most travelled of all my contemporaries; I have extended my field of enquiry wider than anybody else, I have seen more countries and climes, and have heard more speeches of learned men. No one has surpassed me in the composition of lines, according to demonstration, not even the Egyptian knotters of ropes, or geometers.

Now as of old the gods give men all good things, excepting only those that are baneful and injurious and useless. These, now as of old, are not gifts of the gods: men stumble into them themselves because of their own blindness and folly.

To a wise man, the whole earth is open; for the native land of a good soul is the whole earth.

Fortune provides a man's table with luxuries, virtue with only a frugal meal.

Disease of the home and of the life comes about in the same way as that of the body.

These differences, they say, are three: shape, arrangement, and position; because they hold that what is differs only in contour, inter-contact, inclination.

We know nothing accurately in reality, but [only] as it changes according to the bodily condition, and the constitution of those things that flow upon [the body] and impinge upon it.

According to convention there is a sweet and a bitter, a hot and a cold, and according to convention, there is an order. In truth, there are atoms and a void.

The whole Earth is at the hand of the wise man, since the fatherland of an elevated soul is the Universe.

Whatever a poet writes with enthusiasm and a divine inspiration is very fine. Earliest reference to the madness or divine inspiration of poets.

The laws would not prevent each man from living according to his inclination, unless individuals harmed each other; for envy creates the beginning of strife.

Sweet exists by convention, bitter by convention, color by convention; but in reality atoms and the void alone exist