Good character is not formed in a week or a month. It is created little by little, day by day. Protracted and patient effort is needed to develop good character.
HeraclitusRead
Things of which there is sight, hearing, apprehension, these I prefer.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Heraclitus emphasizes the value of direct experience and sensory perception over abstract ideas.
In this quote, Heraclitus expresses the idea that tangible experiences through our senses—sight, hearing, and apprehension—are more meaningful and preferable than abstract concepts or speculative thoughts. This philosophy suggests that understanding the world is grounded in personal, sensory experiences, encouraging a focus on the concrete rather than the theoretical.
Themes
ExperienceSensesPerceptionExistenceReality
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could serve as a reminder during a lecture about the importance of experiential learning.
More from Heraclitus
All quotes →Thinking is a sacred disease and sight is deceptive.
HeraclitusRead
Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.
HeraclitusRead
For when is death not within our selves? And as Heracleitus says: “Living and dead are the same, and so are awake and asleep, young and old. The former when shifted are the latter, and again the latter when shifted are the former."
HeraclitusRead
Whosoever wishes to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details. Knowledge is not intelligence. In searching for the truth be ready for the unexpected. Change alone is unchanging. The same road goes both up and down. The beginning of a circle is also its end. Not I, but the world says it: all is one. And yet everything comes in season.
HeraclitusRead
Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
HeraclitusRead
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Sit in reverie and watch the changing color of the waves that break upon the idle seashore of the mind.
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Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?
James MadisonRead
I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my father, brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.
Charles DarwinRead
I found I could extinguish all human hope from my soul.
Arthur RimbaudRead
We are all born idolaters, and idolatry is good, because it is in the nature of man. Who can get beyond it? Only the perfect man, the God-man. The rest are all idolaters. So long as we see this universe before us, with its forms and shapes, we are all idolaters. This is a gigantic symbol we are worshipping. He who says he is the body is a born idolater.
Swami VivekanandaRead
In nothing do humans approach so nearly to the gods as doing good to others.
Marcus Tullius CiceroRead