"Pythagorean" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is called Euclidean geometry, but which is in the main the work of the Pythagorean school of thinkers and social reformers who flourished from the seventh to the fifth centuries B.C. This formed the greater part of the geometrical truth known to mankind until Descartes and the mathematicians recommenced ...
— Progress and History • Various
... Minor, in the year B.C. 484. His family were rich, and having large commercial transactions they were able to encourage the taste for explorations which he showed. At this time there were many different opinions as to the shape of the earth: the Pythagorean school having even then begun to teach that it must be round, but Herodotus took no part in this discussion, which was of the deepest interest to learned men of that time, and, still young, he left home with a view ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... are unable to penetrate. In the age of Cicero, and still more in that of Diogenes Laertius and Appuleius, many other legends had gathered around the personality of Plato,—more voyages, more journeys to visit tyrants and Pythagorean philosophers. But if, as we agree with Karsten in supposing, they are the forgery of some rhetorician or sophist, we cannot agree with him in also supposing that they are of any historical value, the rather as there is no early ...
— Charmides • Plato
... circumstances would permit, of passing the whole term of my wife's absence without speaking a word to any human being; but now my Pythagorean vow has been broken, within three or four hours after ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... The Pythagorean philosophy was well-suited for the purpose of mingling its doctrines with the fabulous narratives of the Poet, as it consisted, in great part, of the doctrine of an endless series of transformations. Its main features may be reduced to two general heads; the first of which was the doctrine of ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... live in a garret, which I have found frequently visited by the echo and the wind. Nor was the tradition wholly obliterated in the age of Augustus, for Tibullus evidently congratulates himself upon his garret, not without some allusion to the Pythagorean precept: ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... make this assumption. The data at his command did not, as he analyzed them, seem to point to this conclusion. We have seen that Pythagoras probably, and Parmenides surely, out there in Italy had conceived the idea of the earth's rotundity, but the Pythagorean doctrines were not rapidly taken up in the mother-country, and Parmenides, it must be recalled, was a strict contemporary of Anaxagoras himself. It is no reproach, therefore, to the Clazomenaean philosopher that he should have held to the old idea that the earth is flat, or at most a convex disk—the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... according to inspiration from the gods. And he who desires to signify divine concerns through symbols is Orphic, and, in short, accords with those who write fables respecting the gods. But he who does this through images is Pythagoric. For the mathematical disciplines were invented by the Pythagorean in order to a reminiscence of divine concerns, to which through these as images, they endeavour to ascend. For they refer both numbers and figures to the gods, according to the testimony of their historians. But the enthusiastic character, or he who is divinely ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... nothing that has caused me to meditate more on PLATO'S secrecy and sphinx-like nature, than the happily preserved petit fait that under the pillow of his death-bed there was found no "Bible," nor anything Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic—but a book of Aristophanes. How could even Plato have endured life—a Greek life ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... sensible letters extant under the name of this fair Pythagorean. They are addressed to her female friends upon the education of children, the ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... are for the most part the same, as we shall see, though differently expressed and in a different order. The important addition in Bahya is his distinction between God's unity and other unities, which is not found so strictly formulated in any of his predecessors, and goes back to Pseudo-Pythagorean sources in Arabian ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... as it was, there seemed to come over it the beauty of a transfiguration. The change was as great as from the old chaotic world of Pythagoras to the symmetrical and harmonious universe of Newton. My Spiritual World before was a chaos of facts; my Theology, a Pythagorean system trying to make the best of Phenomena apart from the idea of Law. I make no charge against Theology in general. I speak of my own. And I say that I saw it to be in many essential respects centuries behind every department of Science I knew. It was the one region still unpossessed ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... Inscriptions) justly observes in note 389 of the second book; where he says also that the immortality of the soul was not introduced among the Hebrews till their intercourse with the Assyrians. In other respects, the whole Pythagorean system, properly analysed, appears to be merely a system of ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... is marked by a sort of Gothic irregularity. More too than in any other of his Dialogues, Plato is emancipated from former philosophies. The genius of Greek art seems to triumph over the traditions of Pythagorean, Eleatic, or Megarian systems, and 'the old quarrel of poetry and philosophy' has at ...
— Symposium • Plato |
