• Acted: 5th Century BC
  • Lived: 570-475 BC
  • School: Eleatic
  • Main Interests: Theology, Metaphysics, Epistemology
  • Influences: Thales, Pythagoras
  • Location: Sicily

Quotes

Gods didn’t give everything to man from the beginning, but men, discover them by constantly exploring.

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XENOPHANES

Ιωάννου Στοβαίου Ανθολόγιον: ΚΘ, 41

If oxen and horses had hands and could produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen.

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XENOPHANES

The Fragments of the Pre-Socratics, Hermann Diels: DK 11B15

All things come from the earth, and all things end on earth.

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XENOPHANES

The Fragments of the Pre-Socratics, Hermann Diels: DK 11B27
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Biography

Xenophanes was an ancient Greek philosopher, theologian and poet. Knowledge of his views comes from parts of his poetry and survived as quotations by later writers. Xenophanes was judged for his elegiac and iambic poetry where he criticized a wide range of ideas, including Homer and Hesiod, the belief in the pantheon of anthropomorphic gods and the Greeks' veneration of athleticism.