Where there is no strife there is decay: ‘The mixture which is not shaken decomposes.’
We must therefore be guided by what is common to all. The Logos is common to all, yet the multitude lives as if each had his own intelligence.
For what sense or understanding have they? They follow minstrels and take the multitude for a teacher, not knowing that many are bad and few good. For the best men choose one thing above all – immortal glory among mortals; but the masses stuff themselves like cattle.
Unless you expect the unexpected, you will not find it, for it is hidden and thickly tangled.
The most beautiful arrangement is a pile of things poured out at random.
Asses prefer garbage to gold.
One man is worth thousand if he is extraordinary.
War is the father of all and the king of all; it proves some people gods, and some people men; it makes some people slaves and some people free.
That which always was, and is, and will be everliving fire, the same for all, the cosmos, made neither by god or man, replenishes in measure as it burns away.
Dogs, by this same logic, bark at what they cannot understand.
The unseen harmony is better than the visible.
The beginning is the end.
What allows us to be human is something daemonic.
Who will hide from the fire that does not set?
The oneness of all wisdom may be found, or not, under the name of God.
Not comprehending, they hear like the deaf. The saying is their witness: absent while present.
For the best men choose one thing above all – immortal glory among mortals; but the masses stuff themselves like cattle.
Much learning does not teach understanding.
The death of fire is the birth of air, and the death of air is the birth of water. For it is death to souls to become water, and death to water to become earth. But water comes from earth; and from water, soul. Cold things become warm, and what is warm cools; what is wet dries, and the parched is moistened. And it is the same thing in us that is quick and dead, awake and asleep, young and old; the former are shifted and become the latter, and the latter in turn are shifted and become the former.
Mortals are immortals and immortals are mortals, the one living the others’ death and dying the others’ life.
Ever-newer waters flow on those who step into the same rivers. All is flux, nothing stays still.