Anaximander Quotes on Nature
Anaximander of Miletus (c.610–c.546 BC) — the second figure of the Ionian natural-philosophical school descending from Thales — gave early Greek philosophy its first genuinely abstract conception of the natural order. The single surviving fragment, preserved in Simplicius’s commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, identifies the originating principle of all things with the apeiron — the boundless or indefinite — from which the opposites separate out and to which they return through the cosmic justice that exacts retribution from one another for their injustice according to the assessment of time. The framework, with its parallel cosmological and biological speculations (the earth as a free-floating cylinder, life originating in the moist element), inaugurated the Greek philosophical conception of nature as an intelligible order independent of mythological explanation.
Quotes
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Attributed to Anaximander:
“The first principle of things that are is the boundless.”
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Attributed to Anaximander:
“Whence things have their origin, thence also their destruction happens, according to necessity; for they give to each other justice and recompense for their injustice in conformity with the ordinance of Time.”
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Attributed to Anaximander:
“The earth is cylindrical in shape, and its depth is a third of its breadth.”
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Attributed to Anaximander:
“The first living creatures were born in moisture, enclosed in thorny barks; and as their age increased, they came forth upon the drier part.”
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Attributed to Anaximander:
“There are innumerable worlds, which are gods.”
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“The Earth is cylindrical, three times as wide as it is deep, and only the upper part is inhabited. But this Earth is isolated in space, and the sky is a complete sphere in the center of which is located, unsupported, our cylinder, the Earth, situated at an equal distance from all the points of the sky.”
As quoted in "Science Attests the Accuracy of the Bible" in The Watchtower (1 October 1980)