c. 610-546 BC
Anaximander
Philosopher of Miletus, student of Thales, who taught that everything comes from the boundless. His one surviving sentence is the oldest in Western philosophy.
Every line we carry
Each one links to its source, what it means, and the shirt in any of our looks.
- Things pay each other back, in the order of time.
The oldest surviving sentence of Western philosophy says that things give justice and payment to one another for their wrongdoing according to the ordering of time. Heat gives way to cold, day to night, excess to balance. Nothing gets away with tipping the scale forever.
Fragment B1 Diels-Kranz (Simplicius), our translation from the Greek
- The source of everything is the boundless.
Anaximander taught that the origin and element of all things is to apeiron, the unlimited, something beyond any single substance like water or air. It is one of the first big ideas about where the world comes from. Some things are bigger than any name we give them.
Diogenes Laertius 2.1 (DK 12 A 1), our translation from the Greek