Heraclitus — Flux Study Portal

TL;DR

Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 540–480 BC) argued that the world is a process rather than a collection of things, but — and this is the part the slogan destroys — a process governed by a fixed ratio of exchange. His cosmos is an ever-living fire "kindling in measures and going out in measures", and a river counts as the same river precisely because different water is always flowing through it. Change is the mechanism of stability, not its enemy. The public account governing that exchange he calls the logos: common to all, audible to anyone, understood by almost no one, because most people live as though they had a private understanding of their own. Opposites are not contradictions but the two ends of one tension, as in a strung bow: remove the opposition and the thing stops being what it is. Nearly everything above is reconstructed from roughly 130 fragments quoted by later writers with agendas of their own — and the single most quoted line attributed to him, "everything flows", is not among them.