Democritus Quotes

75 quotes in 670 categories

• If your desires are not great, a little will seem much to you; for small appetite makes poverty equivalent to wealth.
• To a wise and good man the whole earth is his fatherland.
• No power and no treasure can outweigh the extension of our knowledge.
• Life unexamined, is not worth living.
• We think there is color, we think there is sweet, we think there is bitter, but in reality there are atoms and a void.
• Nature and education are somewhat similar. The latter transforms man, and in so doing creates a second nature.
• Sexual intercourse is a slight attack of apoplexy.
• Happiness does not reside in strength or money; it lies in rightness and many-sidedness.
• More men have become great through practice than by nature.
• Men will cease to be fools only when they cease to be men.
• Moving in space, the atoms originally were individual units, but inevitable they began to collide with each other, and in cases where their shapes were…
• Whatever a poet writes with enthusiasm and a divine inspiration is very fine. Earliest reference to the madness or divine inspiration of poets.
• Virtue isn't not wronging others but not wishing to wrong others.
• It is hard to fight desire; but to control it is the sign of a reasonable man.
• To a wise man, the whole earth is open; for the native land of a good soul is the whole earth.
• Poor mind, from the senses you take your arguments, and then want to defeat them? Your victory is your defeat.
• I am the most travelled of all my contemporaries; I have extended my field of enquiry wider than anybody else, I have seen more countries…
• The wise man’s home is the universe.
• Soul and intellect are just the same things.
• One great difference between a wise man and a fool is, the former only wishes for what he may possibly obtain; the latter desires impossibilities.

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