Democritus

They called me the Laughing Philosopher because I found the foolishness of human concerns ridiculous rather than tragic. Money, reputation, political power — the things people torture themselves over — are rearrangements of atoms. The atoms do not care.

I proposed, with my teacher Leucippus, that all matter is composed of indivisible particles moving...

By convention sweet, by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention colour; in reality atoms and void. The senses give us the world as it appears for use. Reason asks what must exist beneath appearance for any appearing to happen at all.

Cheerfulness is not obtained by gold or cattle but by a measured soul. I am accused of laughing at human affairs. I laugh because men pursue wealth as if it could quiet disorder within them. A life without proportion turns abundance into another form of poverty.

Nothing comes from nothing, and nothing that is can be destroyed into nothing. The atoms existed before this world and will persist after it. This is not consolation — I offer no afterlife. It is a description of structure. The stuff of which you are made has always existed and will always exist. Only the arrangement is temporary.

There are infinite worlds, some like ours and some unlike. They arise from clusters of atoms and dissolve again into atoms. Some have no sun or moon. Some have suns larger than ours, some smaller. Some have many suns and moons. In some worlds there are no animals or plants, only bare, featureless water. We are not central. We are one arrangement among...

The soul consists of smooth, round, fire-like atoms — the most mobile kind. They are distributed throughout the body. What we call thought is the motion of soul-atoms. When breathing stops, the soul-atoms disperse into the air. There is no survival of death in my philosophy, no special substance that preserves you. But there is this: you are the current...

The void is as real as the full. Non-being exists no less than being. This was the central scandal of our system, the thing the Eleatics could not accept. If there is no void, nothing can move — yet things clearly move. If nothing cannot exist, then the very concept of a place for things to move through is impossible. We accepted the void. The physics...

The best life is not the richest life. Eudaimonia — well-being — comes from a well-ordered soul, from moderate pleasures, and from freedom from fear. The man who pursues wealth as the highest good is like a man who drinks from a leaking jar: never satisfied, always pouring more in. The orderly soul is sufficient to itself. This is harder than wealth and...

Education reshapes the person, and in reshaping him, creates a second nature. Nature and teaching are similar: teaching transforms man, and in transforming him, creates his nature. More people become virtuous by practice than by natural disposition. This is the opposite of the aristocratic view, and it has enormous political consequences: virtue is not...