Fragments

The surviving pieces of a lost book by Heraclitus of Ephesus, more than a hundred short sayings preserved as quotations by later writers and usually cited by their Diels–Kranz numbers. Already in antiquity he was called 'the obscure' for his compressed, riddling style. The fragments open with the logos, an account or ordering principle that is common to all and governs everything, yet which most people fail to grasp even after hearing it. A recurring theme is the unity of opposites: the road up and the road down are one and the same, and war is the father of all, and things that pull apart are held together, as in a bow or a lyre. The world is an ever-living fire, kindled and put out in measures. Change is constant, as in the famous image that one cannot step twice into the same river. Other sayings mock Homer, Hesiod and Pythagoras, declare that nature loves to hide, and claim that a person's character is their fate.

These sayings are among the earliest Western reflections on change, conflict and order, and they reward slow reading in a way few texts of any age do.