The things that are perish into the things from which they come to be, according to necessity; for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice, according to the assessment of time.
This single sentence, preserved by Simplicius, is all that survives of the book — the oldest recorded words of Western philosophy. Aristotle reports the doctrine behind it: the source of all things is the apeiron, the boundless — not water, not air, nothing nameable, but an inexhaustible nature from which the heavens and the worlds within them arise.
Hippolytus adds that the earth, in Anaximander's account, hangs free, held up by nothing, remaining in place because it is equally distant from all things.
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