11/05/2025
All day long, every day in every way!
Heraclitus /
"The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you choose, what you think and what you do is who you become."
"...Heraclitus is known to have produced a single work on papyrus. The title is unknown. According to Diogenes Laërtius, Heraclitus deposited the book in the Artemisium as a dedication. As with the other pre-Socratic philosophers, only fragments of his writings survive in quotations by other authors. In the case of Heraclitus, there are more than 100 of these catalogued using the Diels–Kranz numbering system. Laërtius also states Heraclitus' work was "a continuous treatise ... but was divided into three discourses, one on the universe, another on politics, and a third on theology".[e] Theophrastus says (in Diogenes Laërtius) "some parts of his work [are] half-finished, while other parts [made] a strange medley".
The work's opening lines are known, proving it was a continuous work. Aristotle quotes part of the opening line in the Rhetoric to outline the difficulty in punctuating Heraclitus without ambiguity; he debated whether "forever" applied to "being" or to "prove". Sextus Empiricus in Against the Mathematicians quotes the whole passage:
Of this Logos being forever do men prove to be uncomprehending, both before they hear and once they have heard it. For, though all things come to pass in accordance with this Logos, they are like the unexperienced experiencing words and deeds such as I explain when I distinguish each thing according to its nature and show how it is. Other men are unaware of what they do when they are awake just as they are forgetful of what they do when they are asleep..."