Parmenides Quotes

#1. I first heard of Parmenides' best-known assertion, "Whatever is, is." I laughed and blurted out, "And he's famous?" With this verbal ejaculation I revealed myself as the quintessential sophomore.

R.C. Sproul

#2. [To] interpret Parmenides as a Kant before Kant ... this is exactly what we must do.

Karl Popper

#3. All thinkers then agree in making the contraries principles, both those who describe the All as one and unmoved (for even Parmenides treats hot and cold as principles under the names of fire and earth) and those too who use the rare and the dense. (20)

Aristotle.

#4. This Aristotle knew definitely: the truth has the power to force or constrain men, all men alike, whether it be the great Parmenides and the great Alexander or Parmenides' unknown slave and the least of Alexander's stable-men

Lev Shestov

#5. I have spoken to Einstein and he admitted to me that his theory was in fact no different from the one of Parmenides.

Karl Popper

#6. No space, no time, no gravity, no electromagnetism, no particles. Nothing. We are back where Plato, Aristotle and Parmenides struggled with the great questions: How Come the Universe, How Come Us, How Come Anything? But happily also we have around the answer to these questions. That's us.

John Archibald Wheeler

#7. He had entered Parmenides' magic field: he was enjoying the sweet lightness of being.

Milan Kundera

#8. The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change ... and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real.

Philip K. Dick

#9. In fact the problem Leopardi is facing is speculative and metaphysical, a problem in the history of philosophy from Parmenides to Descartes and Kant: the relationship between the idea of infinity as absolute space and absolute time, and our empirical knowledge of space and time.

Italo Calvino

#10. THE PRESOCRATIC PROBLEM
[all snap flags]
Parmenides named his gun The Hot Power of the Stars. His gun was one, uncreated, imperishable, timeless, changeless, perfect, spherical. Spherical was the problem.

Anne Carson

#11. At the present moment, the security of coherent philosophy, which existed from Parmenides to Hegel, is lost.

Karl Jaspers

#12. Refuting a merely contentious argument - a description which applies to the arguments both of Melissus and of Parmenides: their premisses are false and their conclusions do not follow.

Aristotle.

#13. The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.

Harry Golden

#14. Change is an illusion.

Parmenides

#15. To be and to have meaning are the same.

Parmenides

#16. Knowledge is information that changes something
or somebody - either by becoming grounds for actions, or by making an
individual (or an institution) capable of different or more effective action.

Peter Drucker

#17. Wherefore all these things are but the names which mortals
have given, believing them to be true

Parmenides

#18. ZEUS SUX and TYPHOEUS WUZ HERE.

Rick Riordan

#19. Every thing is of the nature of no thing.

Parmenides

#20. Never will this prevail, that the things that are not are - bar your thought from this road of inquiry.

Parmenides

#21. You must learn all things, both the unshaken heart of persuasive truth, and the opinions of mortals in which there is no true warranty.

Parmenides

#22. I think loving Jesus is something you feel. I think it is something very difficult to get on paper. But it is no less real, no less meaningful, no less beautiful. The

Donald Miller

#23. So this was what it felt like to lose yourself. Again. To let go of your future and let it rise up and up until finally you couldn't see it anymore, and you knew that you had to start over.

Dan Chaon

#24. Thou canst not recognize not-being (for this
is impossible), nor couldst thou speak of it,
for thought and being are the same thing.

Parmenides

#25. When you die, you don't get to catch snowflakes on your tongue. You don't get to breathe winter in, deep in your lungs. You can't lie in bed and watch for the lights of the passing town plow. You can't suck on an icicle until your forehead hurts.

Jodi Picoult

#26. Give me a chance to create a fever and I will cure any disease.

Parmenides

#27. Gaze steadfastly at things which, though far away, are yet present to the mind.

Parmenides

#28. I became a fashion designer by accident. I loved to make portrait drawings when I was a teenager, and from that came the interest in what people were wearing and why they were wearing it.

Ann Demeulemeester

#29. Give me the power to produce fever and I'll cure all disease.

Parmenides

#30. It is indifferent to me where I am to begin, for there shall I return again.

Parmenides

#31. If your goal is to produce firefighters and rescue workers, you have to produce people willing to enter burning buildings.

Brian D. McLaren

#32. Let reason alone decide

Parmenides

#33. Your dues don't have to be paid all at once, but they do have to be paid in full.

Bryan Way

#34. All you have to do is to look like crap on film and everyone thinks you're a brilliant actress. Actually, all you've done is look like crap.

Helen Mirren

#35. We want to do for 'Hamlet' what Baz Luhrmann did for 'Romeo and Juliet' in terms of like a really cool kind of re-imagining.

Emile Hirsch

#36. It is all one to me where I begin;
for I shall come back again there.

Parmenides

#37. We can speak and think only of what exists. And what exists is uncreated and imperishable for it is whole and unchanging and complete. It was not or nor shall be different since it is now, all at once, one and continuous.

Parmenides

#38. Being alone is and nothing is altogether not.

Parmenides

#39. There is one story left, one road: that it is. And on this road there are very many signs that, being, is uncreated and imperishable, whole, unique, unwavering, and complete.

Parmenides

#40. 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.

Parmenides