"Democritus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... philosophers Democritus, Epicurus, and Dicearchus, who denied the immortality of the soul, says they would not dare to maintain their opinion before a magician, who, by the power of his art, and by his spells, possessed the secret of bringing souls from Hades, of making them ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... from moisture. I have further heard Anaximines' doctrine that air was the source of all things; Pherecydes' doctrine of ether as the original principle; Heraclitus' doctrine of fire. Anaximander has taught me that the universe came from some primitive substance; Leucippus and Democritus spoke to me of empty space with primitive corpuscles or atoms. Anaxagoras made believe that the atom had reason. Xenophanes wished to persuade me that God and the Universe were one. Empedocles, the wisest ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... in detail is outside the scope of this investigation; but it may be of interest to see the form they take in one of the latest and most advanced representatives of Ionian naturalism. In Democritus's conception of the universe, personal gods would seem excluded a priori. He works with but three premises: the atoms, their movements, and empty space. From this everything is derived according to strict causality. Such phenomena also as thunder and lightning, comets ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... his poetry Lucretius inherited as part of his birthright. This is the sense of Roman greatness. It pervades the poem, and may be felt in every part; although to Athens, and the Greek sages, Democritus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Heraclitus, and Epicurus, as the fountain-heads of soul-delivering culture, he reserves his most magnificent periods of panegyric. Yet when he would fain persuade his readers that the fear of death is nugatory, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... also keep our sons from filthy language. For, as Democritus says, Language is the shadow of action. They must also be taught to be affable and courteous. For as want of affability is justly hateful, so boys will not be disagreeable to those they associate with, if they ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... Democritus always was glad Of a bumper to cheer up his soul, And would laugh like a man that was mad, When over a good flowing bowl. As long as his cellar was stor'd, The liquor he'd merrily quaff, And when he was drunk as a lord At those that were sober ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... will find its way in. Now, then, attention! I teach the Pseudoxia Epidemica. I have a comrade who will make you laugh, but I can make you think. We live in the same box, laughter being of quite as old a family as thought. When people asked Democritus, 'How do you know?' he answered, 'I laugh.' And if I am asked, 'Why do you laugh?' I shall answer, 'I know.' However, I am not laughing. I am the rectifier of popular errors. I take upon myself the task of cleaning your intellects. They require it. Heaven permits people to deceive themselves, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... grave converse there. The Graces and the Muses formed sprightly choirs upon the grass. Old Homer sang, accompanying himself upon his rustic lyre. His eyes were closed, but divine images shone upon his lips. I saw Solon, Democritus, and Pythagoras watching the games of the young men in the meadow, and, through the foliage of an ancient laurel, I perceived also Hesiod, Orpheus, the melancholy Euripides, and the masculine Sappho. I passed and recognised, as they sat on the bank of a ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... them no farther. These were heads of ancient worthies[1]—Plato, Pythagoras, Socrates, Seneca, and Cicero, whom, from a prejudice acquired at school, I shortly banished again with a quousque tandem! Besides those I have mentioned, there were Democritus and Heraclitus, which last, in those days less the slave of tradition, I called Heraclitus—an error which my excellent schoolmaster (I thank him for it) would have expelled from my head by the judicious application ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... and less paid. What is to be done then? Raise the wages of the more homicidal trades! But this could only be done by all the Unions acting in concert. Now the rival philosophers, who direct the Unions, are all against Democritus—that's myself; they set no value on life. And indeed the most intelligent one, Grotait, smiles blandly on Death, and would grind his scythe for him—AT THE STATEMENT PRICE—because that scythe thins the labor market, and so helps keep ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... perfectly spherical and smooth, and that the spots were merely reflections of our own mountains. Other ancient philosophers had said that these patches were shadows of opaque bodies floating between the sun and the moon. But to the credit of Democritus be it remembered that he propounded the opinion that the spots were diversities or inequalities upon the lunar surface; and thus anticipated by twenty centuries the disclosures of the telescope. The invention of this invaluable appliance ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... essentially partaking of the nature of this pure monism—a very ancient idea which more than two thousand years ago Empedocles enunciated in his doctrine of "hate and love of the elements." Modern physics and chemistry have indeed in the main accepted the atomic hypothesis first enunciated by Democritus, in so far as they regard all bodies as built up of atoms, and reduce all changes to movements of these minutest-discrete particles. All these changes, however, in organic as well as in inorganic nature, become truly intelligible to us only if we conceive these atoms not as dead masses, ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... spirit that dictated the above remark of Hutten, Mosellanus, who opened with a speech the disputation at Leipzig, wrote to Erasmus during the preparations for that event. There will be a rare battle, he said, and a bloody one, coming off between two Scholastics; ten such men as Democritus would find enough to laugh over till they were tired. Moreover, Luther's fundamental conception of religion, with his doctrine of man's sinfulness and need of salvation, so far from corresponding, was in direct antagonism with that Humanistic ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... seems to have been the opinion of Democritus. The modern doctrine of radiation from the human body, if established, would go nearly as far as the supposition in the text. Up till now, however, it ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... children learn their geometry from a book written for the schools of Alexandria two thousand years ago. Modern astronomy is the natural continuation and development of the work of Hipparchus and of Ptolemy; modern physics of that of Democritus and of Archimedes; it was long before biological science outgrew the knowledge bequeathed to us by Aristotle, by ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... was one group of Greek thinkers whose general notions of natural operations correspond in a striking manner to the conclusions of the most recent science. These were the Epicureans. Democritus was in no way a modern experimental scientist, but he met the Eleatic metaphysics with another set of speculative considerations which happened to be nearer what is now regarded as the truth than theirs. He rejected the Eleatic ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... general idea of mind is that which is subordinate to substance, being also found in intimate relations in an atom, and it is itself material." The early Buddhist philosophers also taught that physical elements are among the five "skandas" which constitute the phenomenal soul. Democritus and Lucretius regarded the mind as atomic, and the primal "monad" of Leibnitz was the living germ—smallest of things—which enters into all visible and invisible creations, and which is itself all-potential; ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... explain how the earth is supported, just as were those who invented the myth of Atlas, or the Indians with the tortoise. Thales thought that the flat earth floated on water. Anaxagoras thought that, being flat, it would be buoyed up and supported on the air like a kite. Democritus thought it remained fixed, like the donkey between two bundles of hay, because it was equidistant from all parts of the containing sphere, and there was no reason why it should incline one way rather than another. Empedocles attributed ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... who have treated incidentally of agriculture are more than fifty in number. Those whom you may consult with profit are Hieron of Sicily and Attalus Philometor, among the philosophers; Democritus the physicist; Xenophon the disciple of Socrates; Aristotle and Theophrastus, the peripatetics; Archytas the pythagorean; likewise the Athenian Amphilochus, Anaxipolis of Thasos, Apollodorus of Lemnos, Aristophanes of Mallos, Antigonus of Cyme, Agathocles of Chios, Apollonius ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... instance grasshoppers. And there are many other liquids that are nutritious, such as milk, barley water, and wine. At all events, animals at the breast are nourished by milk; and there are many nations who drink nothing but milk. And it is said that Democritus, the philosopher of Abdera, after he had determined to rid himself of life on account of his extreme old age, and after he had begun to diminish his food day by day, when the day of the Thesmophorian festival came round, and the women of his household besought him not to ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Alcmaeon, Democritus, Diogenes and others—was conducted on a large scale, but the human body was still taboo. Aristotle confesses that the "inward parts of man are known least of all," and he had never seen the human kidneys or uterus. In his physiology, I can refer to but one point—the ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... subject, before his time, at between five and six hundred. As that was two hundred and eight years ago, the number has probably increased to two thousand or more. We have some knowledge of the character of these early works, as far back as Democritus, four hundred and sixty years before the Christian era. The great men of antiquity gave particular attention to study and writing on the honey-bee.—Among them we notice Aristotle, Plato, Columella, Pliny, and Virgil. At a later period, we have Huber, Swammerdam, Warder, Wildman, &c. ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... could, in which mood of laughing they continued so long, that their eyes did water by the vehement concussion of the substance of the brain, by which these lachrymal humidities, being pressed out, glided through the optic nerves, and so to the full represented Democritus Heraclitizing and Heraclitus Democritizing. ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... his back upon the noisy city, and takes his parchments of Plato and Aristotle to be the friends of his councils and the companions of his solitude, seeking by their light to discover Truth, which Democritus had declared to be buried in the ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... DEMOCRITUS, probably the greatest of the Greek physical philosophers, was a native of Abdera in Thrace, or as some say—probably wrongly—of Miletus (Diog. Lart. ix. 34). Our knowledge of his life is based almost entirely on tradition of an untrustworthy ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... natural history with success. They were polished men of society, not profound nor religious, but very brilliant as talkers, and very ready in wit and sophistry. And some of them were men of great learning and talent, like Democritus, Leucippus, and Gorgias. They were not pretenders and quacks; they were skeptics who denied subjective truths, and labored for outward advantage. They were men of general information, skilled in subtleties, of powerful social and political connections, and were ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... for an evening. Some people are so much in love with their curiosity that they object even to having it satisfied too quickly with an obvious explanation. We have an instance of this in a pleasant anecdote about Democritus, which Montaigne borrowed from Plutarch. Montaigne, who substitutes figs for ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... of poets and historians; from the key of each hung a strip of parchment, with a catalogue of the works within. Between the presses, on pedestals of dark green serpentine, ranged busts of the Greek philosophers: Zeno with his brows knitted, Epicurus bland, Aratus gazing upward, Heraclitus in tears, Democritus laughing. These were attributed to ancient artists, and by all who still cared for such things were much admired. In the middle stood a dancing faun in blood red marble, also esteemed a precious work of art. Light entered by an arched window, once glazed, ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... darkness bring his pain relief, One shows the plunder, and one hides the thief. Yet still one gen'ral cry the skies assails, And pain and grandeur load the tainted gales; Few know the toiling statesman's fear or care, Th' insidious rival and the gaping heir. Once more, Democritus, arise on earth, With cheerful wisdom and instructive mirth, See motley life in modern trappings dress'd, And feed with varied fools th' eternal jest: Thou who could'st laugh where want enchain'd caprice, Toil crush'd conceit, and man was of a piece; Where wealth, unlov'd, without a mourner dy'd; ...
— English Satires • Various
... modern philosophers have had the courage to accept experience and reason as their guides, and to shake off the chains of superstition. Lucippe, Democritus, Epicurus, Straton, and some other Greeks, dared to tear away the thick veil of prejudice, and to deliver philosophy from theological fetters. But their systems, too simple, too sensible, and too stripped of wonders for the lovers of fancy, were obliged to surrender to ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... they placed at the basis of their speculations not the Aristotelian concepts of matter and form, the former uncreated and continuous, but adopted the atomistic theory of Democritus, denied the necessity of cause and effect and the validity of natural law, and made God directly responsible for everything that happened every moment in life. God, they said, creates continually, and he is not hampered by any such thing as natural law, which is merely our name for that which we ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... two Infinites of science, that of greatness is the most palpable, and hence a few persons have pretended to know all things. "I will speak of the whole,"[31] said Democritus. ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... of the human Spirit after death. It is only in very modern times that that has been doubted by any large numbers of people. Here and there in the ancient world, like a Lucretius in Rome, perhaps; like a Democritus in Greece; certainly like a Charvaka in India, you find one here and there who doubts the deathlessness of the Spirit in man; but in modern days that disbelief, or the hopeless cynicism which thinks knowledge impossible, has penetrated ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... revivers are Chauliac and Lanfranc; and the Greek school, whose modern champions are Bessarion, Platinus, and Marsilius Ficinus, but whose pristine doctors were medicine's very oracles, Phoebus, Chiron, Aesculapius, and his sons Podalinus and Machaon, Pythagoras, Democritus, Praxagoras, who invented the arteries, and Dioctes, 'qui primus urinae animum dedit.' All these taught orally. Then came Hippocrates, the eighteenth from Aesculapius, and of him we have manuscripts; to him we owe 'the vital principle.' He also invented the bandage, ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... essentially that of their antagonists. And yet in one thing, we believe, most individuals holding these opposite opinions will be found to concur. They all speculate. Heraclitus signs his contract with a shudder, and trembles as he places his realized premium in the bank. Democritus laughingly subscribes his name to thousands, and chuckles as he beholds his favourite stock ascending in the thermometer of the share-market. Heraclitus sells—Democritus holds; and thus the great point of wisdom at issue between them, is reduced to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... &c (amusement) 840; jubilee &c (celebration) 883; paean, Te Deum &c (thanksgiving) 990 [Lat.]; congratulation &c 896. smile, simper, smirk, grin; broad grin, sardonic grin. laughter (amusement) 840. risibility; derision &c 856. Momus; Democritus the Abderite^; rollicker^. V. rejoice, thank one's stars, bless one's stars; congratulate oneself, hug oneself; rub one's hands, clap one's hands; smack the lips, fling up one's cap; dance, skip; sing, carol, chirrup, chirp; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... extreme subtilty, of a purer quality than that which acted grossly on our senses. In consequence, some have regarded the soul as an ethereal substance; others as igneous matter; others again have compared it to light. DEMOCRITUS made it consist in motion, consequently gave it a manner of existence. ARISTOXENES, who was himself a musician, made it harmony. ARISTOTLE regarded the soul as the moving faculty, upon which depended ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... extremities bore resemblance to those of a goat. Monsters possessed of two or more heads or double bodies are found in the legends and fairy tales of every nation. Hippocrates, his precursors, Empedocles and Democritus, and Pliny, Aristotle, and Galen, have all described monsters, although ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... i. 2, he associates Democritus, a natural philosopher, with Pythagoras and Empedocies. See viii. 7, Sec. 8, and Brucker, vol. i. p. ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... first author goeth furthest, and time leeseth and corrupteth. So we see artillery, sailing, printing, and the like, were grossly managed at the first, and by time accommodated and refined; but contrariwise, the philosophies and sciences of Aristotle, Plato, Democritus, Hippocrates, Euclides, Archimedes, of most vigour at the first, and by time degenerate and imbased: whereof the reason is no other, but that in the former many wits and industries have contributed ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... we apply volatile alkali, or other strong odorous substances, to the nostrils, and with the greatest effect. It may indeed for some time supply the place, and produce the effects, of solid nutriment usually received into the stomach We are told that Democritus supported his expiring life, and retarded, for three days, the hour of death, by inhaling the smell of hot bread, when he could not take nutriment by the stomach. Bacon likewise gives us an account of a man who lived a considerable time without meat ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... woe, the sun stays not his course. On: over battle-field and bower; over tower, and town, he speeds,—peers in at births, and death-beds; lights up cathedral, mosque, and pagan shrine;—laughing over all;—a very Democritus in the sky; and in one brief day sees more than any ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... also, in no small degree, the labours of Democritus of Abdera tended. He had had the advantages derived from wealth in the procurement of knowledge, for it is said that his father was rich enough to be able to entertain the Persian King Xerxes, who was so gratified thereby that he left several Magi and Chaldaeans to complete the education ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... DEMOCRITUS, a Greek philosopher, born in Abdera, Thrace, of wealthy parents; spent his patrimony in travel, gathered knowledge from far and near, and gave the fruits of it in a series of writings to his contemporary compatriots, only fragments of which remain, though they must have come down comparatively ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... reluctantly that Seneca can be brought to confess that any philosopher had ever paid the smallest attention to anything that could possibly promote what vulgar people would consider as the well-being of mankind. He labours to clear Democritus from the disgraceful imputation of having made the first arch, and Anacharsis from the charge of having contrived the potter's wheel. He is forced to own that such a thing might happen; and it may also happen, he tells us, that a philosopher may be swift of foot. But it is not in his character ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... ideas are perfect, simple, immaterial, and impartible natures. And what wonder is there, says Syrianus, if we should separate things which are so much distant from each other? Since neither do we imitate in this particular Plutarch, Atticus, and Democritus, who, because universal reasons perpetually subsist in the essence of the soul, were of opinion that these reasons are ideas: for though they separate them from the universal in sensible natures, yet ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... fascination of a whip, when one has nothing to flagellate but the calves of his own legs, I could never understand. Yet a small riding-whip is the most popular article with the miscellaneous New-Englander at all great gatherings,—cattle-shows and Fourth-of-July celebrations. If Democritus and Heraclitus could walk arm in arm through one of these crowds, the first would be in a broad laugh to see the multitude of young persons who were rejoicing in the possession of one of these useless and worthless little commodities; ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of the evolution of matter is found in the speculation of the Greeks. Leucippus and Democritus imagined unchanging eternal atoms, Heracleitus held that all things were in a continual state of ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others |
