Heraclitus · a new plain-English translation from the original language
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.