Quote by Anaximander: “Things perish into those from which they had their birth, as is right and due.”

Everything that comes into existence will eventually return to what it came from — animals to earth, water to sea, fire to heat. Anaximander saw this not as tragedy but as a kind of cosmic justice: the world maintains balance through constant return and renewal. Nothing escapes the cycle.

Anaximander wrote during the early Milesian school of philosophy in Ionia, a period when Greek thinkers were making the transition from mythological to naturalistic explanations of the cosmos. His surviving fragment is considered by some historians to be the oldest surviving sentence of European philosophy.

Greek philosopher from Miletus who lived approximately 610–546 BCE, a student of Thales. He is known for developing the concept of the apeiron — an indefinite, boundless source of all things — and for producing one of the earliest known maps of the world. Only a single fragment of his writing survives, quoted by later philosophers.