Heraclitus: The Fragments
The Plainspoken Classics - Scriptorium Press (First Edition, 2026)
An original AI translation made directly from the source language.
https://openscriptorium.com


======== Fragments (DK B1–B10) ========

B1. Of this logos, which holds forever, people prove uncomprehending — both before they have heard it and once they have heard it first. For though all things come to pass according to this logos, they are like people without experience even when they experience such words and works as I set forth, distinguishing each thing according to its nature and declaring how it stands. Other people fail to notice what they do awake, just as they forget what they do asleep.
B2. Though the logos is common, most people live as if they had a private understanding of their own.
B3. [On the size of the sun:] the width of a human foot.
B4. If happiness lay in the pleasures of the body, we would call oxen happy when they find bitter vetch to eat.
B5. They purify themselves in vain with blood, being defiled by it — as if a man who had stepped into mud were to wash himself off with mud. Anyone who noticed a person doing that would think him mad. And they pray to these statues — as if someone were to chat with houses — knowing nothing of what gods and heroes really are.
B6. The sun, as Heraclitus says, is new each day.
B7. If all things turned to smoke, the nostrils would still tell them apart.
B8. What opposes converges; from things that differ comes the most beautiful attunement; and all things come to be through strife.
B9. A horse's pleasure is one thing, a dog's another, a man's another. Donkeys would choose sweepings over gold — for to donkeys, fodder is sweeter than gold.
B10. Graspings: wholes and not wholes, converging and diverging, singing together and apart — out of all things one, and out of one thing all.

======== Fragments (DK B11–B20) ========

B11. Every creature that crawls is driven to pasture by a blow.
B12. On those who step into the same rivers, different and different waters flow.
B13. Pigs delight more in muck than in clean water.
B14. The mysteries as people customarily practice them are celebrated impiously.
B15. If it were not Dionysus for whom they held the procession and sang the hymn to the shameful parts, it would be a most shameless act. But Hades and Dionysus are the same — the one for whom they rave and keep the wine-frenzy.
B16. How could anyone escape the notice of what never sets?
B17. Most people do not grasp the things they run into, nor do they understand them even when taught — but they seem to themselves to.
B18. If one does not hope, one will not find the unhoped-for: it is not to be tracked down, and no path leads to it.
B19. Not knowing how to listen, they do not know how to speak.
B20. Once born, they wish to live and to hold their allotted deaths — or, better, to come to rest — and they leave behind children, who become allotted deaths in turn.

======== Fragments (DK B21–B30) ========

B21. Death is whatever we see awake; whatever we see asleep is sleep.
B22. Seekers of gold dig through a great deal of earth and come up with little.
B23. They would not even know the name of Justice if these things did not exist.
B24. Gods and men honor those slain by Ares.
B25. Greater deaths win greater portions.
B26. A man in the night kindles a light for himself when his sight is quenched. Living, he touches the dead in his sleep; waking, he touches the sleeper.
B27. There await people when they die things they neither hope for nor imagine.
B28. The most esteemed of them knows — and guards — mere seemings. Yet Justice will catch up with the fabricators of lies and their witnesses.
B29. The best choose one thing above all others: everflowing fame among mortals. But the many are glutted like cattle.
B30. This world-order, the same for all, no god made and no man; it always was, and is, and will be: everliving fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures.

======== Fragments (DK B31–B40) ========

B31. The turnings of fire: first sea; and of sea, half is earth, half lightning-storm. Sea is poured out and measured back to the same proportion it had before it became earth.
B32. The one, the wise alone, is both unwilling and willing to bear the name of Zeus.
B33. Law is this too: obedience to the counsel of one.
B34. Uncomprehending even when they have heard, they are like the deaf. The saying bears witness to them: present, they are absent.
B35. Men who love wisdom must be inquirers into very many things indeed.
B36. For souls, becoming water is death; for water, becoming earth is death. Yet out of earth water is born, and out of water, soul.
B37. Pigs wash in mud; barnyard birds in dust or ash.
B38. Thales, some think, was the first to study the stars — and Heraclitus and Democritus bear witness for him.
B39. In Priene lived Bias son of Teutames, whose account counts for more than the others'.
B40. Much learning does not teach a person understanding — otherwise it would have taught it to Hesiod and to Pythagoras, and again to Xenophanes and to Hecataeus.

======== Fragments (DK B41–B50) ========

B41. The wise is one thing: to know the thought that steers all things through all things.
B42. Homer, he used to say, deserves to be thrown out of the contests and beaten with a staff — and Archilochus likewise.
B43. Arrogance must be quenched more than a blaze.
B44. The people must fight for the law as for the city wall.
B45. You would not find the limits of the soul though you traveled every road: so deep is the logos it has.
B46. Self-conceit, he called the sacred disease; and seeing, he said, lies.
B47. Let us not guess at random about the greatest matters.
B48. The bow's name is life; its work is death.
B49. One man is ten thousand to me, if he is the best.
B50. Listening not to me but to the logos, it is wise to agree that all things are one. (Hippolytus, Refutation IX 9)

======== Fragments (DK B51–B60) ========

B51. They do not comprehend how, at variance with itself, it agrees with itself: a back-turning attunement, as of the bow and the lyre. (Hippolytus, Refutation IX 9)
B52. Lifetime is a child at play, moving pieces on a board: the kingship belongs to a child. (Hippolytus, Refutation IX 9)
B53. War is father of all and king of all; some it has shown to be gods, others human beings; some it has made slaves, others free. (Hippolytus, Refutation IX 9)
B54. An unseen attunement is stronger than a visible one. (Hippolytus, Refutation IX 9)
B55. Whatever comes by sight, hearing, learning — that I prefer. (Hippolytus, Refutation IX 9)
B56. People are deceived about the knowledge of visible things much as Homer was, who was wiser than all the Greeks. For boys killing lice deceived him by saying: what we saw and caught, we leave behind; what we neither saw nor caught, we carry with us. (Hippolytus, Refutation IX 9)
B57. The teacher of most is Hesiod. They are sure he knew the most things — a man who did not recognize day and night: for they are one. (Hippolytus, Refutation IX 10)
B58. Doctors, at any rate, who cut and cauterize and torment the sick cruelly in every way, then complain that they get no fee from the sick — though they deserve nothing, since they produce the same things: the cures and the diseases. (Hippolytus, Refutation IX 10)
B59. The path of the letters, he says, straight and crooked, is one and the same.
B60. The road up and the road down: one and the same.

======== Fragments (DK B61–B70) ========

B61. Sea: water most pure and most foul — for fish drinkable and life-giving, for human beings undrinkable and deadly.
B62. Immortals mortal, mortals immortal: living the death of those, dying the life of these.
B63. There, before the one who is, they rise up and become wakeful guardians of the living and the dead.
B64. All these things the thunderbolt steers.
B65. He calls it need and satiety.
B66. Fire, when it comes upon them, will judge and seize all things.
B67. The god: day night, winter summer, war peace, satiety hunger — all the opposites; this is the meaning. It alters the way fire does when mingled with incense: it is named according to the savor of each.
B68. And for this reason Heraclitus fittingly called them remedies, as healing what is terrible and rendering souls unscathed by the misfortunes that belong to becoming.
B69. I therefore posit two kinds of sacrifice: those of people wholly purified, such as might rarely occur in a single individual.
B70. He held that human opinions are children's toys.

======== Fragments (DK B71–B80) ========

B71. Remember, too, the one who forgets where the road leads.
B72. The logos with which they most continually keep company — the one that manages the whole — from this they are at variance; and the things they meet every day appear foreign to them.
B73. We must not act and speak like people asleep — for then, too, we seem to act and speak.
B74. We must not act like children of our parents — that is, put plainly: in the way we have received by tradition.
B75. Sleepers are workers, and fellow-workers in what comes to pass in the world.
B76. The death of fire is birth for air, and the death of air is birth for water.
B77. Whence Heraclitus said that for souls it is delight — or death — to become moist; and delight, for them, is the fall into becoming. And elsewhere he said that we live the death of those souls, and they live our death.
B78. Human character does not hold right judgments; divine character does.
B79. A man is called infant by a divinity the way a boy is by a man.
B80. One must know that war is common, and justice is strife, and all things come to pass through strife and necessity.

======== Fragments (DK B81–B90) ========

B81. The arts of words they called cleavers — Timaeus among others, writing thus: so that Pythagoras appears not to be the inventor of the true cleavers, nor the man denounced by Heraclitus; rather it is Heraclitus himself who is the braggart.
B82. The most beautiful of apes is ugly set against the race of human beings.
B83. The wisest of human beings will appear an ape next to a god — in wisdom, in beauty, and in everything else.
B84. Changing, it rests. It is weariness to labor at the same things and to be ruled by them.
B85. It is hard to fight against anger: whatever it wants, it buys at the price of soul.
B86. Most of what is divine, according to Heraclitus, escapes recognition through unbelief.
B87. A dull man loves to be fluttered by every word.
B88. The same thing is in us living and dead, waking and sleeping, young and old: these, having shifted, are those, and those, having shifted back, are these.
B89. Heraclitus says that for the waking there is one common world, but each of the sleeping turns aside into a private one.
B90. For fire all things trade themselves, and fire for all things — the way wares trade for gold and gold for wares.

======== Fragments (DK B91–B100) ========

B91. [For, as Heraclitus has it, you cannot step a second time into the same river, nor twice touch a mortal substance in the same condition; through the sharpness and speed of its change] it scatters and collects itself once more [(or rather, not once more, not later, but simultaneously)] it forms and dissolves, draws near and goes away.
B92. The Sibyl with raving mouth, according to Heraclitus, uttering things unlaughing, unadorned, unperfumed, reaches across a thousand years with her voice, because of the god.
B93. The lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but gives a sign.
B94. The sun will not overstep its measures; if it does, the Furies, allies of Justice, will find it out.
B95. It is better to hide one's ignorance.
B96. Corpses are more fit for throwing out than dung.
B97. Dogs bark at whomever they do not know.
B98. Souls smell their way through Hades.
B99. If there were no sun, for all the other stars could do, it would be night.
B100. The cycles — over which the sun stands as overseer and watchman, to fix and adjudicate and display and bring to light the changes and the seasons that carry all things, according to Heraclitus.

======== Fragments (DK B101–B111) ========

B101. I searched myself.
B102. To the god everything is beautiful, good, and just; human beings, though, have taken some things to be unjust and others just.
B103. For on the circumference of a circle, beginning and end are common.
B104. For what mind or sense do they have? They follow the bards of the townships and take the crowd for a teacher, not knowing that the many are bad and the good are few.
B105. He calls Homer a student of the stars.
B106. Heraclitus rebuked Hesiod for counting certain days good and certain days bad, since he failed to see that the nature of each and every day is one.
B107. Eyes and ears are bad witnesses for people who have barbarian souls.
B108. Of all those whose accounts I have heard, none arrives at this: to recognize that the wise is set apart from all things.
B110. It is not better for human beings to get all they want.
B111. Sickness makes health sweet and good; hunger, satiety; weariness, rest.

======== Fragments (DK B112–B121) ========

B112. Sound thinking is the greatest excellence; and wisdom is to speak what is true and to act according to nature, listening to it.
B113. Thinking is common to all.
B114. Those who would speak with mind must brace themselves on what all share, as a city braces on law — and far more strongly. For every human law draws its nourishment from the one law that is divine; that law prevails as far as it wishes, is sufficient for everything, and still overflows.
B115. To soul belongs a logos that increases itself.
B116. It belongs to all people to know themselves and to think soundly.
B117. A man, when he is drunk, is led along by a beardless boy, stumbling, not perceiving where he is going, having his soul wet.
B118. A dry gleam: soul wisest and best.
B119. Heraclitus said that character, for a human being, is fate.
B120. The Bear marks the bounds of morning and evening; and opposite the Bear stands the boundary-stone of Zeus of the clear sky.
B121. The Ephesians deserve, all the grown men of them, to hang themselves and hand the city over to the beardless — they who banished Hermodorus, the worthiest man they had, declaring: among us let there be no one worthiest; and if there is, let it be elsewhere, with other people.

======== Fragments (DK B122–B129) ========

B122. Stepping near.
B123. Nature loves to hide.
B124. Like sweepings poured out at random — so, says Heraclitus, is the most beautiful world-order.
B125. Even the barley-drink separates if it is not stirred.
B126. Cold things warm, a warm thing cools, a moist thing dries, a parched thing is moistened.
B127. The same man said to the Egyptians: if they are gods, why do you mourn them? But if you mourn them, no longer consider them gods.
B129. Pythagoras son of Mnesarchus pursued inquiry further than anyone, and by selecting from these writings he fashioned a wisdom of his own — much learning, an art of mischief.