- Lived:
- c. 535–475 BCE · Ephesus, a Greek city on the coast of what is now Turkey
- Tradition:
- Pre-Socratic Greek; the philosopher of change
- The Big Idea:
- The world is not a stable thing but an ordered process — a ceaseless, law-governed exchange in which opposites need each other, and hidden behind the flux is a single rational pattern, the logos, that most people sleep through.
- In their words:
- "Upon those who step into the same rivers, ever different waters flow."
- If you remember one thing:
- Everything flows — and that is not chaos. The river stays the same because the water keeps changing.