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
Similar quotes
History is for human self-knowledge. Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a person; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of person you are; and thirdly, knowing what it is to be the person you are and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what they can do until they try, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.
Robin G. CollingwoodRead
In so far as the mind sees things in their eternal aspect, it participates in eternity.
Baruch SpinozaRead
If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.
Viktor E. FranklRead
Variant: When it is not in our power to follow what is true, we ought to follow what is most probable.
Rene DescartesRead
There has to be a balance, Vin," Elend said. "Somehow, we'll find it. The balance between whom we wish to be and whom we need to be." He sighed. "But for now," he said, nodding to the side, "we simply have to be satisfied with who we are.
Brandon SandersonRead
All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths; they become facts, or at best, part of the public character; or at worst, catchwords.
T. S. EliotRead