Empedocles Quotes

“At first sight nothing seems more obvious than that everything has a beginning and an end, and that everything can be subdivided into smaller parts. Nevertheless, for entirely speculative reasons the philosophers of Antiquity, especially the Stoics, concluded this concept to be quite unnecessary. The prodigious development of physics has now reached the same conclusion as those philosophers, Empedocles and Democritus in particular, who lived around 500 B.C.E. and for whom even ancient man had a lively admiration.”
― Svante Arrhenius

“Henry Corbin's [inner] teacher, his sheikh, was Suhrawardi: A Persian Sufi from the twelfth century who'd been put to death while still in his thirties for the things he said and did. Suhrawardi claimed he was simply continuing a spiritual lineage which he referred to as the Dawning [ishrāq]. But towards the end of what would be a short life he ran into trouble with orthodox Muslims because he insisted on tracing his lineage a long way back—far beyond even the prophet Muhammed—to the Greeks, and specifically Empedocles.”
― Peter Kingsley, A Book of Life

“he ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles said that two forces – love and hate – govern the universe. Love fuses things together. Hate splits them apart. In a foundation myth of ancient Egypt, the god Osiris was killed by his brother Set, and his body cut into many pieces and scattered across Egypt. His wife collected all of the dismembered parts together and then, with the help of Anubis, the god of embalming and funerary rites, and Thoth, the god of magic, she restored Osiris’s body to life. This is a creation myth based on fission – the god is torn apart – followed by fusion – the god is reassembled. Dr. Frankenstein, the modern Thoth, the scientific Thoth, fused body parts of dead criminals together then animated the creature. Human society is full of fusion forces that bring people together, and fission forces that break them apart. Fusion forces unite. Fission forces divide. We now live in a Fission Phase, with extreme polarization evident everywhere. There’s no sign of any Fusion Phase coming to the rescue any time soon.”
― Peter Brennan, Fusions Versus Fissions: Are You a Joiner or a Splitter?

“… Ne mettrez-vous pas fin à sauvage cri,
Ce fauve hurlement des bêtes qu’on abat ?
Jusqu’à quand, insensé, meurtrissant et meurtri,
Dévoreras-tu ta propre substance ?…

… Comme un père hébété égorge son enfant,
Et prie, ô l’imbécile !”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, La Couronne et la Lyre: Anthologie de la poésie grecque ancienne

“Earth, air, fire, and water," he began. "The ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles says that these four elements are the roots of everything."
Here was the garden he inherited from Leah. Celia, who mostly tended it, called it her sculpture in four dimensions, the fourth being time. Perhaps all sculpture changed over time, with decay and dissolution setting in, rust and chipping and breakage. But marble or bronze evolved so slowly, and their changes were unintended, while the garden was always in visible flux, each morning a new unfolding. Celia always said that the flower beds were a progression of looping actions: each plant opening, blooming, fading, setting seed, drooping, falling; and each seed rooting, sprouting, budding, blooming. And the seasons, the moons and days, the pendulum of darkness and light, the beat of the cardinal's song. Was the earth, then, our real timepiece? Stop, Pindar. Pay attention.
"But Empedocles also said that our spirits have successive lives, born sometimes as the fair-tressed laurel trees, sometimes as lions who live in the golden grass...."
A shifting of the light through the trees made Pindar notice the Queen Anne's lace in its brass vase. Constellations of tiny white stars swirled in a galactic umbrella the size of his hand- who was above? Who below? Beside their lacy flaring explosives symmetry, the black-eyed Susans gazed at him with their fierce yellow. Wide-open, with none of the hidden turns and caverns of the lilies whose trumpets would be deep enough to incubate in, or at least hide one's thoughts in, though their scent would be too strong for the dinner table.”
― Grace Dane Mazur, The Garden Party: A Novel

“Just the other day I looked up the Greek philosopher Empedocles and I was amazed to see that UBIK in many ways expresses his world-view. It is a view generally discarded these days. In May of this year a guy from France doing his doctoral thesis on UBIK flew here and asked me, 'You know Empedocles?' to which I had to admit no, I didn't even know the name. The French guy got very angry, as if he believed I was lying, and walked out. Now I can see why. It is impossible to believe that anyone could write UBIK without having gotten the concepts from Empedocles. By the way—Empedocles, I read, believed that he would be reincarnated and return some day. I'm not kidding. He expected to come back—but I bet he didn't anticipate finding himself in Fullerton. I guess the part where they're all dead is because ol' E. has been dead these many centuries and knows a lot about how it feels (I wish I was kidding when I say all this, but I'm not; I mean, I really sort of believe this).”
― Philip K. Dick, The Selected Letters, 1974

“You may recall the day we were over at Special Collections Library at Cal State Fullerton, and I revealed my mystic vision which came over me around March of this year, in which I saw the world—make that universe—entirely differently. Finally, in doing my homework on this, I found someone who had that worldview before me, and oddly it is a Greek philosopher who someone who flew here from France to interview me mentioned, around April. I had never read anything about Empedocles before. This French guy, who was doing his doctoral thesis on UBIK, wondered if my reading of Empedocles had influenced me, or had any other pre-Socratic Greek. I had to admit no. Evidently this French dude had correctly seen that UBIK expressed the worldview of Empedocles and to a lesser extent other Ionian Greeks or the Eleatic School. It was all meaningless to me, what he was saying, back then; how strange that my vision of the universe would conform in strict and exact detail to that of specific early Greek philosophers, views (as Lem pointed out in his article) long ago discarded.

Also, from what I read about Empedocles, he had certain what we'd have to call religious or mystical experiences which he discussed only with his friends; from the evidence I'm convinced these experiences resemble mine—were in fact identical. Empedocles was smart enough not to talk about them openly, and I'm trying to do the same. Whatever hit me in March hit him back in 400 or so B.C. Reading about his interpretation of them I can much better understand them for my own purposes. Also, I might add, Empedocles was certain that some day, through transmigration, he would return.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Selected Letters, 1974

“Adapting certain features of Empedoclean daimonology, Plato formulated a more rigorous theory of daimonification through virtue. He daimonified the soldiers of his ideal republic for their courage, and daimonified rulers (“guardians”) for their wisdom. In his Cratylus, Plato vouched for the daimonification of all people who were noble and wise. Plato’s Timaeus introduced the ultimate democratic principle of daimonification by identifying one’s guardian daimon with humanity’s higher consciousness (or nous).”
― Carl William Brown, Applied Daimonology. Principles and essays.