Parmenides Quotes on Truth
Parmenides of Elea's poem opens with the goddess promising to reveal both the unshakable heart of well-rounded truth and the opinions of mortals in which there is no genuine trust. The Way of Truth deduces, from the simple principle that what-is is and what-is-not is not, that being must be one, ungenerated, indivisible, immobile, and complete — and that the entire apparent world of plurality, motion, and becoming therefore belongs to the Way of Opinion rather than to truth. The argument frames the entire subsequent Western metaphysical tradition: Plato's distinction between the unchanging Forms and the shifting sensible world, Aristotle's analysis of being and substance, the medieval doctrine of God as ipsum esse subsistens, and the modern dispute over the nature of time can each be read as responses to the Parmenidean challenge.
Quotes
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Attributed to Parmenides:
“It is the same thing to think and to be.”
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Attributed to Parmenides:
“What is, is; what is not, is not.”
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Attributed to Parmenides:
“It is necessary to speak and to think what is; for being is, but nothing is not.”
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Attributed to Parmenides:
“Thinking and the thought that it is are the same.”
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Attributed to Parmenides:
“What is is uncreated and indestructible, whole, of one kind, and unmoving.”
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“You must learn all things, both the unshaken heart of persuasive truth , and the opinions of mortals in which there is no true warranty.”
Frag B 1.28-30, quoted by Sextus Empiricus , Against the Mathematicians , vii. 3; Simplicius , Commentary on the Heavens , 557-8; Proclus , Commentary on the Timaeus I , 345 -
“The only roads of enquiry there are to think of: one, that it is and that it is not possible for it not to be, this is the path of persuasion (for truth is its companion); the other, that it is not and that it must not be — this I say to you is a path wholly unknowable.”
Frag. B 2.2-6, quoted by Proclus , Commentary on the Timaeus I , 345