Theophrastus Quotes on Knowledge
Theophrastus of Eresus (c.371–c.287 BC) — Aristotle’s principal student and successor as scholarch of the Lyceum — gave the early Peripatetic tradition its most systematic continuation and refinement of the founder’s encyclopedic philosophical project. The surviving works on plants (Historia Plantarum, De Causis Plantarum) supply the principal classical foundation for botany, while the Characters supplies the founding text of the literary genre of moral typology and the surviving fragments of the metaphysical and physical writings continue Aristotle’s analyses with characteristic methodological care for the cataloguing of empirical detail and the patient comparison of philosophical alternatives. The framework, transmitted through the doxographical tradition descending from Theophrastus’s own Tenets of the Natural Philosophers, supplied the principal early Peripatetic source for our knowledge of the Pre-Socratic tradition and shaped the subsequent Aristotelian engagement with the natural sciences.
Quotes
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Attributed to Theophrastus:
“Plants, like animals, have their own kinds and their own characters.”
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“Συνεχές τε … πολυτελὲς ἀνάλωμα εἶναι τὸν χρόνον.”
Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend. | Diogenes Laërtius , Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers , Book 5. -
“Diogenes Laërtius , Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers , Book 5.”
Συνεχές τε … πολυτελὲς ἀνάλωμα εἶναι τὸν χρόνον. -
“The Unseasonable man is one who will go up to a busy person, and open his heart to him. He will serenade his mistress when she has a fever. He will address himself to a man who has been cast in a surety-suit, and request him to become his security. He will come to give evidence when the trial is over.”
Characters , ch. 9 (12); translation from R. C. Jebb and J. E. Sandys (trans.), The Characters of Theophrastus (London: Macmillan, 1909), p. 75. -
“Superstition would seem to be simply cowardice in regard to the supernatural.”
Characters , ch. 28 (16); translation from R. C. Jebb and J. E. Sandys (trans.), The Characters of Theophrastus (London: Macmillan, 1909), p. 139. -
“Εἰ μὲν ἀμαθὴς εἶ, φρονίμως ποιεῖς, εἰ δὲ πεπαίδευσαι, ἀφρόνως.”
If you are an ignorant man, you are acting wisely; but if you have had any education, you are behaving like a fool. | Quoted by Diogenes Laërtius ; translation from C. D. Yonge (trans.), The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (London: H. G. Bohn, 1853), p. 196. | Said "when a man preserved a strict silence during the whole of a banquet". -
“If you are an ignorant man, you are acting wisely; but if you have had any education, you are behaving like a fool.”
Εἰ μὲν ἀμαθὴς εἶ, φρονίμως ποιεῖς, εἰ δὲ πεπαίδευσαι, ἀφρόνως. -
“Said "when a man preserved a strict silence during the whole of a banquet".”
Εἰ μὲν ἀμαθὴς εἶ, φρονίμως ποιεῖς, εἰ δὲ πεπαίδευσαι, ἀφρόνως.