Heraclitus, c. 500 BC. Most of us are at least vaguely familiar with the name and some of the aphoristic thoughts attributed to him, like not stepping into the same river twice, or even encountered the rejoinder due to Cratylus, a follower of Heraclitus, that one cannot step into the same river even once.

Heraclitus's thought, such as is known, is preserved in a bit more than one hundred fragments, most a sentence or two. There have been two general approaches to organizing the fragments, the first deliberately arbitrary, the second by imputed thematic unities. Our purpose here from time to time to reproduce several of them following thematic unity, and comment welcome! From Heraclitus, Translation and Analysis Dennis Sweet, 1995.

Fragments on Seeing:

#21 Death is what we see when awake, but what we see when sleeping is sleep.

#54* The hidden harmony is superior to the visible.

#55 Whatever comes from sight, hearing, learning by inquiry, these things I honor.

#56. People are thoroughly beguiled regarding the knowledge of manifest things, as was Homer, who was wisest of all the Greeks. For he was beguiled by the boys killing lice, who said, "What we saw and seized, those we left behind; what we neither saw nor seized, those we bring."

#101a Eyes are more accurate witnesses than ears.

#107 Eyes and ears are bad witnesses for people who have barbarian souls.


*The fragment is four words, harmonin aphaneis phanereis kreitton. Roughly translated: harmony not-appearing (not-manifest) appearing (manifestly) stronger. Sweet's translations are highly regarded, and his comment on harmony itself, ἁρμονία, is worth reproducing in full. "In addition to the idea of a concordance of sounds, the word harmonia also conveys the idea of things being fastened and joined together for a purpose. Thus Homer and Herodotus employ the term to describe the joining together of a ship's planks.
"Heraclitus insists the most beautiful harmony comes from things in conflict or at variance with one another. This is a hidden harmony, superior to any perceivable harmony. It is discernible only by the person with wisdom, that is , one who understands the lawful order and systematic connectedness that underlies the apparent diversity and disjointedness of appearances" (Sweet, p. 60, 1995).