Quotes about Xenophanes

8 Sourced Quotes

Xenophanes might be saying that we have only superficial understanding, and we never get to knowledge of the clear truth.

Xenophanes said, "I confess myself the greatest coward in the world, for I dare not do an ill thing."

Plutarch
Plutarch
Xenophanes was the first person who asserted... that the soul is a spirit.

Atheists are confounded with Pantheists, such as Xenophanes among the ancients, or Spinoza and Schelling among the moderns, who, instead of denying God, absorb everything into him.

The distinction between knowledge and belief is a theme that continues throughout Greek philosophy, emerging crucially in the central works of Plato. In Plato it recurs together with the idea, hinted at here in Xenophanes and taken to extremes in Parmenides and Zeno, that there may be a problem about the relation between physical objects as they seem to be and the metaphysical reality as it really is.

By taking us on a cumulative sequence from our own familiar gods, through those of other ethnic groups, to those of animals, Xenophanes shows that our own images have no more authority than those of animals.

This is a sworn treaty made between us, Hannibal … and Xenophanes the Athenian … in the presence of all the gods who possess Macedonia and the rest of Greece.

Polybius
Polybius
Xenophanes speaks thus:—
And no man knows distinctly anything,
And no man ever will.