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Anaxagoras Quotes

Anaxagoras was a Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher. Born in Clazomenae at a time when Asia Minor was under the control of the Persian Empire, Anaxagoras came to Athens. According to Diogenes Laërtius and Plutarch, in later life he was charged with impiety and went into exile in Lampsacus; the charges may have been political, owing to his association with Pericles, if they were not fabricated by later ancient biographers.Responding to the claims of Parmenides on the impossibility of change, Anaxagoras described the world as a mixture of primary imperishable ingredients, where material variation was never caused by an absolute presence of a particular ingredient, but rather by its relative preponderance over the other ingredients; in his words, "each one is... most manifestly those things of which there are the most in it". He introduced the concept of Nous as an ordering force, which moved and separated out the original mixture, which was homogeneous, or nearly so.

He also gave a number of novel scientific accounts of natural phenomena. He deduced a correct explanation for eclipses and described the sun as a fiery mass larger than the Peloponnese, as well as attempting to explain rainbows and meteors. Wikipedia  

✵ 500 BC – 428 BC
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Anaxagoras: 7 quotes3 likes

Famous Anaxagoras Quotes

“All things were together, infinite both in number and in smallness; for the small too was infinite.”

Anaxagoras

Frag. B 1, quoted in John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, (1920), Chapter 6.

“The sun provides the moon with its brightness.”

Anaxagoras

Fragment in Plutarch De facie in orbe lunae, 929b, as quoted in The Riverside Dictionary of Biography (2005), p. 23

“Wrongly do the Greeks suppose that aught begins or ceases to be; for nothing comes into being or is destroyed; but all is an aggregation or secretion of pre-existent things: so that all-becoming might more correctly be called becoming-mixed, and all corruption, becoming-separate.”

Anaxagoras

quoted in Heinrich Ritter, Tr. from German by Alexander James William Morrison, The History of Ancient Philosophy, Vol.1 http://books.google.com/books?id=pUgXAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA284 (1838)

“The Greeks follow a wrong usage in speaking of coming into being and passing away; for nothing comes into being or passes away, but there is mingling and separation of things that are. So they would be right to call coming into being mixture, and passing away separation.”

Anaxagoras

Frag. B 17, quoted in John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, (1920), Chapter 6.

“And since these things are so, we must suppose that there are contained many things and of all sorts in the things that are uniting, seeds of all things, with all sorts of shapes and colours and savours”

Anaxagoras

Frag. B 4, quoted in John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, (1920), Chapter 6.

“Mind is infinite and self-ruled, and is mixed with nothing, but is alone itself by itself.”

Anaxagoras

Frag. B 12, quoted in John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, (1920), Chapter 6.

“Thought is something limitless and independent, and has been mixed with no thing but is alone by itself. … What was mingled with it would have prevented it from having power over anything in the way in which it does. … For it is the finest of all things and the purest.”

Anaxagoras

Frag. B12, in Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy (1984), p. 190.

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