Zeno Quotes & Sayings

Man conquers the world by conquering himself. — Zeno Of Citium

In slow drowning waves the knowledge washed over Cressida, her professor did not think that she was so special after all. He didn't know her father Zeno. Was that it? — Joyce Carol Oates

All the good are friends of one another. — Zeno Of Citium

That is, for a mathematical Platonist, what the C.H. proofs really show is that set theory needs to find a better set of core axioms than classical ZFS, or at least it will need to add some further postulates that are-like the Axiom of Choice-both "self-evident" and Consistent with classical axioms. If you're interested, Godel's own personal view was that the Continuum Hypothesis is false, that there are actually a whole (Infinity Symbol) of Zeno-type (Infinity Symbol)s nested between (Aleph0) and c, and that sooner or later a principle would be found that proved this. As of now no such principle's ever been found. Godel and Cantor both died in confinement, bequeathing a world with no finite circumference. One that spins, now, in a new kind of all-formal Void. Mathematics continues to get out of bed. — David Foster Wallace

Yes, I laugh at all mankind, and the imposition that they dare to practice when they talk of hearts. I laugh at human passions and human cares, vice and virtue, religion and impiety; they are all the result of petty localities, and artificial situation. One physical want, one severe and abrupt lesson from the colorless and shriveled lip of necessity, is worth all the logic of the empty wretches who have presumed to prate it, from Zeno down to Burgersdicius. It silences in a second all the feeble sophistry of conventional life, and ascetical passion. — Charles Robert Maturin

To be in the mind and to be known are the same thing: in this domain esse est percipi. — Zeno Vendler

You should rather suppose that those are involved in worthwhile duties who wish to have daily as their closest friends Zeno, Pythagoras, Democritus and all the other high priests of liberal studies, and Aristotle and Theophrastus. None of these will be too busy to see you, none of these will not send his visitor away happier and more devoted to himself, none of these will allow anyone to depart empty-handed. They are at home to all mortals by night and by day. — Seneca.

So Zeno is most famous for his tortoise paradox. Let us imagine that you are in a race with a tortoise. The tortoise has a ten-yard head start. In the time it takes you to run that ten yards, the tortoise has moved one yard. And then in the time it takes you to make up that distance, the tortoise goes a bit farther, and so on forever. You are faster than the tortoise but you can never catch him; you can only decrease his lead. — John Green

But what has been said once can always be repeated. — Zeno Of Elea

Beauty is the flower of chastity. — Zeno Of Elea

It was precisely this notion of infinite series which in the sixth century BC led the Greek philosopher Zeno to conclude that since an arrow shot towards a target first had to cover half the distance, and then half the remainder, and then half the remainder after that, and so on ad infinitum, the result was, as I will now demonstrate, that though an arrow is always approaching its target, it never quite gets there, and Saint Sebastian died of fright. — Tom Stoppard

My writing is an answer to the partisans of the many and it returns their attack with interest, with a view to showing that the hypothesis of the many, if examined sufficiently in detail, leads to even more ridiculous results than the hypothesis of the One — Zeno Of Elea

By silence, I hear other men's imperfections and conceal my own. — Zeno Of Elea

No evil is honorable: but death is honorable; therefore death is not evil. — Citium Zeno

When Zeno, who did not believe in slavery, was beating his slave for some offense, the slave pleaded, in mitigation, that by his master's philosophy he had been destined from all eternity to commit this fault; to which Zeno replied, with the calm of a sage, that on the same philosophy he, Zeno, had been destined to beat him for it. — Will Durant

All things are parts of one single system, which is called nature; the individual life is good when it is in harmony with nature. — Zeno Of Citium

The end may be defined as life in accordance with nature or, in other words, in accordance with our own human nature as well as that of the universe. — Zeno Of Citium

The reason why we have two ears and only one mouth is that we may listen the more and talk the less. — Zeno Of Citium

It is fair to say that those who make Zeno, Pythagoras, Democritus and other giants of philosophy their daily companions will be more fully engaged in a rewarding life. None of these friends will be too busy to welcome you inside their home, none will fail to leave his caller feeling refreshed after an appointment. Any man can spend time with them day or night. — Seneca.

Wellbeing is attained by little and little, and nevertheless is no little thing itself. — Citium Zeno

The avaricious man is like the barren sandy ground of the desert which sucks in all the rain and dew with greediness, but yields no fruitful herbs or plants for the benefit of others. — Zeno Of Elea

If you're now noticing a certain family resemblance among this no-successive-instant problem, Zeno's Paradoxes, and some of the Real Line crunchers described in Paragraph 2c and -e, be advised that this is not a coincidence. They are all facets of the great continuity conundrum for mathematics, which is that (Infinity)-related entities can apparently be neither handled nor eliminated. Nowhere is this more evident than with 1/(Infinity)s. They're riddled with paradox and can't be defined, but if you banish them from math you end up having to posit an infinite density to any interval, in which the idea of succession makes no sense and no ordering of points in the interval can ever be complete, since between any two points there will be not just some other points but a whole infinity of them.
Overall point: However good calculus is at quantifying motion and change, it can do nothing to solve the real paradoxes of continuity. Not without a coherent theory of (Infinity), anyway. — David Foster Wallace

When Zeno received news of a shipwreck and heard that all his luggage had been sunk he said, Fortune bids me to be a less encumbered philosopher. — Seneca.

Zeno gave his lectures on the stoa, the covered walkways or porticos that surrounded the Athenian marketplace. His followers were first called Zenonians and later Stoics. He presided over his school for fifty-eight years and the manner of his death at the age of ninety-eight is bizarre. One day, as he was leaving the school, he tripped and fell, breaking a toe. Lying there in pain, he struck the ground with his fist and quoted a line from the Niobe of Timotheus, "I come of my own accord; why then call me?" He died on the spot through holding his breath. — Simon Critchley

I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno's arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied. — Pico Iyer

The authority of Plato and Aristotle, of Zeno and Epicurus, still reigned in the schools; and their systems, transmitted with blind deference from one generation of disciples to another, precluded every generous attempt to exercise the powers, or enlarge the limits, of the human mind. — Edward Gibbon

His bowels, far greater alchemist than he had ever been, regularly performed the transmutation of corpses, those of beasts and of plants, into living matter, separating the useful from the dross without help from him. Ignis inferioris Naturae: those spirals of brown mud, precisely coiled and still steaming from the decocting process which they have undergone in their mold, this ammoniac and nitric fluid passed into a clay pot, were the visible and fetid proof of work completed in laboratories where we do not intervene. It seemed to Zeno that the disgust of fastidious persons at this refuse, and the obscene laughter of the ignorant, were due less to the fact that these objects offend our senses than to our horror in the presence of the mysterious and ineluctable routines of our bodies. — Marguerite Yourcenar

There is an important feature of modern science that is almost completely missing in all the thinkers I have mentioned, from Thales to Plato: none of them attempted to verify or even (aside perhaps from Zeno) seriously to justify their speculations. In — Steven Weinberg

Zeno first started that doctrine, that knavery is the best defence against a knave. — Plutarch

Better to trip with the feet than with the tongue — Zeno Of Citium

Esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived, said good old Berkeley; but, according to most philosophers, he was wrong. Yet, obviously, there are things for which the adage holds. Perception, trivially, to begin with. If elements of conscious awareness
pains, tickles, feelings of heat and cold, sensory qualia of colors, sounds, and the like
have any existence, it must consist in their being perceived by a subject ... This shows, of course, that such experiences are epiphenomenal, at least with respect to the physical world. — Zeno Vendler

No matter whether you claim a slave by purchase or capture, the title is bad. They who claim to own their fellow-men, look down into the pit and forget the justice that should rule the world. — Zeno Of Citium

Two and a half thousand years later, Zeno's arrow paradox finally makes sense. The Eleatic School of philosophy, which Zeno brilliantly defended, was right. So was Werner Heisenberg when he said, "A path comes into existence only when you observe it." There is neither time nor motion without life. Reality is not "there" with definite properties waiting to be discovered but actually comes into being depending upon the actions of the observer. — Robert Lanza

To define [Canada] or its literature seems like putting a finger on Zeno's arrow: no sooner do you think you have done it than it has moved on. — M.G. Vassanji

That's the point of Zeno's Paradox, isn't it? Whatever your goal, you're never more than halfway there. — Sam A. Patel

Zeno was concerned with three problems ... These are the problem of the infinitesimal, the infinite, and continuity. — Bertrand Russell

Experience and imagination must enter into the very constitution of our thoughts involving concrete individuals. — Zeno Vendler

We have two ears and one mouth, so we should listen more than we say. — Zeno Of Citium

When the two men sat down to supper, Jan Myers cracked some of his favorite jokes about the clergy and their dogma. Though Zeno remembered that he used to find such pleasantries amusing, they seemed rather flat to him now; nevertheless...he said to himself that at a time when religion was leading to savagery, the rudimentary skepticism of this good fellow certainly had its value. For himself, however, being more advanced in methods of negating assumptions, at first, in order to see if thereafter something positive can be reaffirmed, and of breaking down a whole in order to watch the parts recompose themselves on another plane or in some other fashion, he no longer felt able to laugh at those easy jests. — Marguerite Yourcenar

To be virtuous, then, is to live as we were designed to live; it is to live, as Zeno put it, in accordance with nature.18 The Stoics would add that if we do this, we will have a good life. — William B. Irvine

If being is many, it must be both like and unlike, and this is impossible, for neither can the like be unlike, nor the unlike like — Zeno Of Citium

That which exercises reason is more excellent than that which does not exercise reason; there is nothing more excellent than the universe, therefore the universe exercises reason. — Zeno Of Citium

Whatever I think or feel inevitably turns into a form of inertia. Thought, which for other people is a compass to guide action, is for me its microscope, making me see whole universes to span where a footstep would have sufficed, as if Zeno's argument about the impossibility of crossing a given space - which, being infinitely divisible, is therefore infinite - were a strange drug that had intoxicated my psychological self. And feeling, which in other people enters the will like a hand in a glove, or like a fist in the guard of a sword, was always in me another form of thought - futile like a rage that makes us tremble so much we can't move, or like a panic (the panic, in my case, of feeling too intensely) that freezes the frightened man in his tracks, when his fright should make him flee. — Fernando Pessoa

The great modern novel of the comic-pathetic illusion of freedom is Confessions of Zeno . — Italo Svevo

Fate is the endless chain of causation, whereby things are; the reason or formula by which the world goes on. — Citium Zeno

The full analysis of the notions of saying something and understanding what one said inevitably involves a concept which, as I will show in detail, essentially corresponds to the Cartesian idea of thought. — Zeno Vendler

Zeno's quote-unquote discovered a loophole in the Trust that smashes through the edict regarding love matches and divorces." — Leta Blake

With each divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the visible and finite, and comes out into eternity, and inspires and expires its air. It converses with truths that have always been spoken in the world, and becomes conscious of a closer sympathy with Zeno and Arrian, than with persons in the house. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

A bad feeling is a commotion of the mind repugnant to reason, and against nature. — Zeno Of Citium

The second [argument about motion] is the so-called Achilles, and it amounts to this, that in a race the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead.
Statement of the Achilles and the Tortoise paradox in the relation of the discrete to the continuous.; perhaps the earliest example of the reductio ad absurdum method of proof. — Zeno Of Elea

A woman's beauty is supposed to be her grand project and constant insecurity. We're meant to shellac our lips with five different glosses, but always think we're fat. Beauty is Zeno's paradox. We should endlessly strive for it, but it's not socially acceptable to admit we're there. We can't perceive it in ourselves. It belongs to the guy screaming 'nice tits. — Molly Crabapple

In vain did Zeno remind him that the stars, though they influence our destinies, do not determine them; and that our lives are regulated by the heart, that fiery star palpitating in the dark of our bodies, suspended there in its cage of flesh and bone, as strong and mysterious as the stars above, and obeying laws more complicated than the laws which we ourselves make. — Marguerite Yourcenar

Happiness is a good flow of life, — Zeno Of Citium

Stalwart Zeno seemed oblivious, that faith in his daughter being alive after more than forty days did not compute with faith that Brett Kincaid would soon be arrested for a crime involving his daughter. — Joyce Carol Oates

Love is a God, who cooperates in securing the safety of the city. — Zeno Of Citium

Steel your sensibilities, so that life shall hurt you as little as possible. — Zeno Of Citium

A line is not made up of points ... In the same way, time is not made up parts considered as indivisible 'nows.' Part of Aristotle's reply to Zeno's paradox concerning continuity. — Aristotle.

It is one thing to remember, another to know. To remember is to safeguard something entrusted to the memory. But to know is to make each thing one's own, not depend on the text and always to look back to the teacher. "Zeno said this, Cleanthes said this." Let there be space between you and the book. — Seneca The Younger

We are falling back into allegory," said the Captain, interrupting him. "If you mean by all that that the body is the most solid of realities, then say so."
"No, not exactly," Zeno explained. "This body, our kingdom, sometimes seems to me to be made of a fabric as loosely woven and as evanescent as a shadow. I should hardly be more astonished to see my mother again (who is dead) than to come upon you around a corner as I did, your face grown older and its substance recomposed more than once in twenty years' time, with its color altered by the seasons and its form somewhat changed, but your mouth still knowing my name. Think of the grain that has grown and the creatures that have lived and died in order to sustain that Henry who is and is not the one I knew twenty years ago. — Marguerite Yourcenar

The goal of life is living in agreement with Nature. — Zeno Of Citium