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Diversity repels; likeness attracts.
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“Diversity repels; likeness attracts.”

Boethius

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Source
How Substances Can Be Good in Virtue of Their Existence Without Being Absolute Goods
Date
c. 520s
Meaning

Meaning of “Diversity repels; likeness attracts.”

The concise axiom is one premise in Boethius’s metaphysical argument: things are described as tending toward what is like them, not as a modern empirical rule about human attraction or relationships.

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Where does it come from?

How Substances Can Be Good in Virtue of Their Existence Without Being Absolute Goods (De Hebdomadibus), preliminary proposition IX, H. F. Stewart / E. K. Rand 1918 edition, Project Gutenberg #13316. Kept as a historical metaphysical premise, not social-science evidence.

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DeepIdentityMindPhilosophyShortThinking Quotes About Reasoning, Reflection & JudgmentThought-Provoking Quotes That Invite ReflectionUnderstandingKnowledge
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To define is to limit.
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“To define is to limit.”

Oscar Wilde · The Picture of Dorian Gray — 1891 edition · 1891
Voice: Fictional character · Lord Henry Wotton
Meaning & context

Definitions clarify ideas but can also narrow them, especially when a label is treated as the complete reality of a person or experience.

Source details

The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891 edition, Chapter 17; Lord Henry answers the Duchess of Monmouth’s question “What are you?” with “To define is to limit.”

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All men by nature desire to know.
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“All men by nature desire to know.”

Aristotle · Metaphysics · c. 350 BCE
Meaning & context

Aristotle treats the desire for knowledge as a basic human tendency, giving curiosity a foundational place in the movement from perception toward understanding.

Source details

Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book I, Chapter I, W. D. Ross translation (1908), validated Wikisource scan leaf 21. 'All men by nature desire to know' opens the work before the discussion of sensation, memory, experience, art and knowledge. This remains ancient philosophy mediated by translation, not a modern empirical finding about cognition.

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Hence more than half their disputes are at bottom verbal.
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“Hence more than half their disputes are at bottom verbal.”

George Henry Lewes · The Physical Basis of Mind · 1877
Meaning & context

Lewes argues that many apparent disagreements persist because people use the same terms with different meanings, making precision of language part of clearer reasoning.

Source details

The Physical Basis of Mind, chapter on consciousness and unconsciousness; Project Gutenberg #60212. Lewes is discussing ambiguity of scientific terms, so the line supports communication and conceptual clarity rather than a claim that all disputes are merely verbal.

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Reading is thinking with some one else's head instead of one's own.
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“Reading is thinking with some one else's head instead of one's own.”

Arthur Schopenhauer · Essays of Schopenhauer — On Books and Reading · 1851
Meaning & context

Reading supplies another mind’s thought, but Schopenhauer warns that consuming ideas should not replace the work of forming one’s own connected judgment.

Source details

Essay “On Books and Reading,” in a public-domain English collection of Schopenhauer’s essays.

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We hear only the questions to which we are capable of finding an answer.
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“We hear only the questions to which we are capable of finding an answer.”

Friedrich Nietzsche · The Joyful Wisdom · 1910
Meaning & context

The aphorism suggests that inquiry is limited by the conceptual capacities of the person asking, making intellectual growth partly a matter of becoming able to formulate and recognize better questions.

Source details

The Joyful Wisdom, aphorism 196; Thomas Common translation.

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Our business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our conduct.
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“Our business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our conduct.”

John Locke · An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I · 1690
Meaning & context

Locke places useful limits around intellectual ambition: human inquiry need not comprehend everything in order to guide life well, and knowing where understanding stops is part of using it responsibly.

Source details

An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Book I, Chapter I, section 6, Project Gutenberg #10615. Locke follows his sounding-line analogy by saying that our business is not to know all things but those concerning conduct. The passage belongs to seventeenth-century epistemology and moral reflection, not a modern cognitive-science finding.

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