Men would live exceedingly quiet if these two words, mine and thine, were taken away.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that conflict arises from ownership and possessiveness.
Anaxagoras implies that the concepts of ownership, represented by 'mine' and 'thine', are significant sources of turmoil in human relationships. Without the distinction of possession, people might find greater peace and harmony, as many conflicts stem from how we attribute value to things based on ownership.
In practice
In a discussion about minimalism, this quote could emphasize the benefits of reducing attachments.
The Greeks are wrong to recognize coming into being and perishing; for nothing comes into being nor perishes, but is rather compounded or dissolved from things that are. So they would be right to call coming into being composition and perishing dissolution.
Appearances are a glimpse of the unseen.
It is not I who have lost the Athenians, but the Athenians who have lost me.
Everything has a natural explanation. The moon is not a god but a great rock and the sun a hot rock.
And since the portions of the great and the small are equal in number, so too all things would be in everything. Nor is it possible that they should exist apart, but all things have a portion of everything.
The descent into Hades is much the same from whatever place we start.
Opponents of civil liberties contend the NSA data collection has made our country more safe, but even the most vocal defenders of the program have failed to identify a single thwarted plot.
Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.
What you resist persists. And only what you look at, and own, can disappear. You make it disappear by simply changing your mind about it.
I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.
Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar;_x000D_ _x000D_ Wait the great teacher, Death, and God adore;_x000D_ _x000D_ What future bliss He gives not thee to know,_x000D_ _x000D_ But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.
If I seem to wander, if I seem to stray, remember that true stories seldom take the straightest way
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