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.
The supramental transformation, the supramental evolution must carry with it a lifting of mind, life and body out of themselves into a greater way of being in which yet their own ways and powers would be, not suppressed or abolished, but perfected and fulfilled by the self-exceeding.
No one knows what cuases an outer landscape to become an inner one.
Is it not the excess and greed of this and the neglect of all other things that revolutionizes this constitution too and prepares the way for the necessity of a dictatorship?
Say I feel all sad and self-indulgent, then get stung by a wasp, my misery feels quite abstract and I long just to be in spiritual pain once more - 'damn you tiny assassin, clad in yellow and black, how I crave my former innocence where melancholy was my only trial'.
You may think you find peace in Christ when you have no outward troubles, but is Christ your peace when the Assyrian comes into the land, when the enemy comes?...Jesus Christ would be peace to the soul when the enemy comes into the city, and into your houses.
In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.
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