Tao Te Ching

The Power of Goodness, the Wisdom Beyond Words
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Empedocles

490 – 430 BCE

"The father of rhetoric"—Aristotle

Empedocles Ἐμπεδοκλῆς (490 – 430 BCE)
Brilliant orator, physician, poet, vegetarian, magician, pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, and called by Aristotle the father of rhetoric; Empedocles, according to Kingsley, “brought the germs of a new civilization into existence” and became a foundational researcher who set the stage for Euclid and the other early scientists. Also a highly successful politician who helped over through tyrannical and oligarchic governments but then declined offered sovereignty, he was the last Greek philosopher to write in verse. First in the west to describe the four classical elements, he taught the first comprehensive theory of light and vision, anticipated Darwin's theory of natural selection, and believed that all living things reincarnate between humans, animals and plants. Said by Pliny to have traveled to the east and studied with the Magi, Empedocles explained how limited and narrow our perceptions remain while our concepts fool us into believing we understand the whole, how we believe the words without insight into the sense.

Eras

Sources

On Nature

Unlisted Sources

Quotes by Empedocles (6 quotes)

“The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.”

from On Nature

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“Earth’s sweat, the sea.”

from On Nature

Themes: Water

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“at one time there grew to be the one alone out of many, and at another time it separated so that there were many out of the one”

from On Nature

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“What is lawful is not binding only on some and not binding on others. Lawfulness extends everywhere, through the wide-ruling air and the boundless light of the sky.

from On Nature

Themes: Law and Order

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“Pythagoras… a man of rare knowledge, most skilled in all manner of wise works, a man who had won the utmost wealth of wisdom; for whensoever he strained with all his mind, he easily saw everything of all the things that are”

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“For already I have once been a boy and a girl, a bush and a bird and a dumb sea fish.”

Themes: Karma

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Quotes about Empedocles (1 quotes)

“More scientific than Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle… The originality of Empedocles' originality, outside science, consists in the doctrine of the four elements and in the use of the two principles of Life and Strife to explain change.”

Bertrand Russell 1872 – 1970 CE
“20th century Voltaire”
from History of Western Philosophy

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