"Pythagorean" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... According to the Pythagorean teaching, the human soul emanates from the Soul of the World, thus affirming, at the outset, the divine nature of the former. It teaches subsequently that this soul assumes successive bodies until it has fully evolved and completed the "Cycle ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... work. The Li Chi, or Book of Rites, which now forms part of the Confucian Canon, is however a comparatively modern compilation, dating only from the 1st century B.C. (2) The extraordinary similarities between the Chinese and Pythagorean systems of music force the conclusion that one of these must necessarily have been derived from the other. The Jesuit Fathers jumped to the conclusion that the Greeks borrowed their art from the Chinese; but it is now common ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... sever himself from this obnoxious tradition.[5] It is true that neither the Pythagorean nor the Egypto-Tychonic system required epicycles for explaining retrograde motion, as the Ptolemaic theory did. Furthermore, either system could use the excentric of Hipparchus to explain the irregular motion known as the equation of the centre. But Copernicus remarked that he could also use ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... in a long succession of endeavours. Of the first building that was raised, it might be, with certainty, determined that it was round or square; but whether it was spacious or lofty must have been referred to time. The Pythagorean scale of numbers was at once discovered to be perfect; but the poems of Homer we yet know not to transcend the common limits of human intelligence, but by remarking, that nation after nation, and century after century, has been ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... been moved through similar facts to exalted affections? Who is there, of good sense, who cannot see what a fine thing Aristotle made of it, when, being a master of belles lettres at Alexandria, he set himself to oppose and make war against the Pythagorean doctrine, and that of natural philosophy; seeking by means of his logical ratiocination to propose definitions and notions, certain fifth entities and other abortive portions of fantastical cogitations, as principles and substance of things, more anxious about the esteem of the vulgar stupid ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... is, more of a philosopher in the Socratic mode of reasoning (Cicero calls the Platonic writings generally, Socratici libri); and Mr. C. also says, that in the metaphysical disquisitions Plato is Pythagorean, meaning, that he worked on the supposed ideal or transcendental principles of the extraordinary founder of the ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... larger-minded fathers of the Church, influenced possibly by Pythagorean traditions, but certainly by Aristotle and Plato, were willing to accept this view, but the majority of them took fright at once. To them it seemed fraught with dangers to Scripture, by which, of course, they meant their interpretation of Scripture. Among the first who took ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... In flaming curtains to the dead; 640 And men as often dangled for't, And yet will never leave the sport. Nor do the ladies want excuse For all the stratagems they use To gain the advantage of the set, 645 And lurch the amorous rook and cheat For as the Pythagorean soul Runs through all beasts, and fish and fowl, And has a smack of ev'ry one, So love does, and has ever done; 650 And therefore, though 'tis ne'er so fond, Takes strangely to the vagabond. 'Tis but an ague that's reverst, Whose hot fit takes the ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... well said, implies the birth of criticism, comparison and research. At the opening of that education of modern by ancient thought which we call the Renaissance, it was the words of Aristotle which sent Columbus sailing to the New World, while a fragment of Pythagorean astronomy set Copernicus thinking on that train of reasoning which has revolutionised the whole position of our planet in the universe. Then it was seen that the only meaning of progress is a return to Greek modes of thought. The monkish hymns which obscured ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... planets, etc.[101] Besides these fantastic meanings, there are more complicated inventions—calculating, from the letters of one's name, the years of life of a sick person, the auspices of a marriage, etc. The Pythagorean philosophy, as Zeller has shown, is the systematic form of this mathematical mysticism, for which numbers are not symbols of quantitative relations, but the ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... scantily-furnished 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 by Law. ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... above; they relate chiefly to corpses, to infected houses, to women in connection with menstruation and childbirth,[1036] to certain official persons (as the Roman flamen dialis). There are also the lists of unlucky days (Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, Roman). The origin of food prohibitions (Hebrew, Pythagorean) is uncertain;[1037] they may have arisen, as is suggested above, from general regard for sacred animals and plants, or from totemistic relations, or from other conditions unknown to us; the Hebrew lists of forbidden animals may have been gradually expanded under ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... was impressed by the Pythagorean philosophy, and very often quotes it in his speeches. Socrates gave Pythagoras as an authority on the simple life, and stated that he was willing to follow him in anything save his injunction to keep silence. Socrates wanted silence optional; ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... a purpose, if 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
... of Bernard Shaw Fills me with mingled Mirth and Awe. Mixture of Mephistopheles, Don Quixote, and Diogenes, The Devil's wit, the Don's Romance Joined to the Cynic's arrogance. Framed on Pythagorean plan, A Vegetable Souperman. Here you may see him crown with bay The Greatest Playwright of his day;[1] Observe the look of Self ...
— Confessions of a Caricaturist • Oliver Herford
... replied, "with the unexplained Pythagorean symbol touching abstinence from beans. Perhaps future events ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... designated an atheist, probably because there was nothing in his writings to which he might be pinned down, that fate befell two of his contemporaries, Hippo of Rhegium and Diogenes of Apollonia. Very little, however, is known of them. Hippo, who is said to have been a Pythagorean, taught that water and fire were the origin of everything; as to the reason why he earned the nickname atheos, it is said that he taught that Water was the primal cause of all, as well as that he maintained that nothing existed but what could be perceived by the senses. There ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... relation between the two ideas is apparent in the alleged account of the Pythagorean doctrine which Diogenes Laertius took from Alexander Polyhistor, and which is in reality an apocryphal composition of the first century of our era. It was said that Hermes guided the pure souls, after their separation from the body, ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... OMICRON}{GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA}; but there is great uncertainty as to the most material of his philosophical and religious opinions. It is believed that he wrote nothing himself, and that the earliest Pythagorean treatises were the work of Philolaus, a contemporary of Socrates. It appears, however, that he undertook to solve by reference to one single primary principle the problem of the origin and constitution of the universe. His predilection for mathematics led him to ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... power, so mystic and so revolutionary, had, by the means of branch societies, established itself throughout a considerable portion of Italy, that a general feeling of alarm and suspicion broke out against the sage and his sectarians. The anti-Pythagorean risings, according to Porphyry, were sufficiently numerous and active to be remembered for long generations afterward. Many of the sage's friends are said to have perished, and it is doubtful whether Pythagoras himself fell a victim to the rage of his ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... relating to the great lily growing in the Himalayan lake, Karl had mentioned from time to time to his companions: for he knew that the Nelumbium speciosum was the celebrated Pythagorean bean mentioned in the writings of the Greeks—more especially ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... names did not exist. People belonged to a clan or served some local prince. Similarly in religious matters they followed some teacher or worshipped some god, and in either case if they were in earnest they tended to become members of a society. Societies such as the Pythagorean and Orphic brotherhoods were also common in Greece from the sixth century B.C. onwards but the result was small, for the genius of the Greeks turned towards politics and philosophy. But in India, where politics had strangely little attraction for the ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... of an irresponsible power in a state; and from the effects of a decrease of a country's corn to the effects of a decrease of its gold (the utility of which, but not of corn, depends on its value, and its value on its scarcity). Such, also, were the Pythagorean inferences that there is a music of the spheres, because the intervals between the planets have the same proportion as the divisions of the monochord; and, again, that the movements of the stars as being divine must be regular, because so are those even ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... this idea of a Triad peculiar to Plato? or did it originate with him? 'The Platonists,' says Horsley, 'pretended to be no more than expositors of a more ancient doctrine which is traced from Plato to Parmenides; from Parmenides to his master of the Pythagorean sect; from the Pythagoreans to Orpheus, the earliest of Grecian mystagogues; from Orpheus to the secret lore of Egyptian priests in which the foundations of the Orphic theology were laid. Similar notions are found in the Persian and Chaldean theology; ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... with one relic of antiquity, a Pythagorean. He has obliged me with his biography. He was, to use his own words, engendered by the sun shining on a dunghill at his father's door,' and began his career as a flea; but his identity was, somehow, shifted to a boy of nine years old. He has had a long spell of humanity, and awaits the ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... explains Thy leanness, and thy prodigal moustache And dried-up curls. Thy counterpart I saw, A wan Pythagorean, yesterday. He said he came from Athens: shoes he had none: He pined, I'll warrant,—for ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... which had been the primitive mode of association and coherence of groups, began to break down in the sixth century B.C. in Greece. It was superseded by the social tie of a common religious faith and ritual. The Pythagorean and Orphic sects developed this tie. They had a revelation of the other world, a system of mystic and cathartic rites, which cleared men of ritual uncleanness, purified them, and "saved" them. The cathartic rites were a means of warding ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... riches, powerful without subjects, a subject without a master, dare to condemn death: kings will then tremble before thee, whilst thou alone shalt fear no person.'.... It was the passion of honor and philosophic fanaticism alone that could induce Timicha, the Pythagorean, in the midst of torture, to bite off her tongue, that she might not expose herself to reveal the secrets of her sect. Cato, when a child, going with his tutor to Sylla's palace, at seeing the bloody heads of the proscribed, ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... you are so lean, and hence comes this long moustache, and these love-locks all adust. Just such a figure was a Pythagorean that came here of late, barefoot and wan,— and said he was an Athenian. Marry, he too was in love, methinks, with a plate ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... 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 ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Paris, published at Vienna, in 1794, a Greek translation of Fontenelle's Entretiens sur la Pluralite des Mondes. John Camarases, a Constantinopolitan, translated into French the apocryphal treatise, De Universi Natura, attributed to Ocellus Lucanus, a Pythagorean philosopher, who is said to have flourished in Lucania in the fifth ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... freely—in order that I may not be suspected of secret connivance, which is foreign to my nature—that M. Leroux has my full sympathy. Not that I am a believer in his quasi-Pythagorean philosophy (upon this subject I should have more than one observation to submit to him, provided a veteran covered with stripes would not despise the remarks of a conscript); not that I feel bound to this ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... continued, swathing his knees in his coat-tails—'I doubt whether you have given much attention to the subject lately discussed by the Boston Dodo Society of Pythagorean Research.' ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... injunction to 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 Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... Cargill, "you are like to have a Pythagorean entertainment; but you are a traveller, and have doubtless been in your time thankful for ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... number, of proportion, and of harmony; others are relations of phenomena to essential being—relations of qualities to substance, of becoming to being, of the finite to the infinite. The former constituted the field of Pythagorean the latter of Eleatic contemplation. The Pythagoreans sought to explain the universe by numbers, forms, and harmonies; the Eleatics by the a priori ideas of unity, substance, Being in se, the Infinite. Thus were constituted a Mathematical ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Origen in Ep. ad Rom., V: "I [Paul], he says, died [Rom. 7:9], for now sin began to be reckoned unto me. But Basilides, not noticing that these things ought to be understood of the natural law, according to impious and foolish fables turns this apostolic saying into the Pythagorean dogma, that is, attempts to prove from this word of the Apostle that souls are transferred from one body to another. For he says that the Apostle has said, 'I lived without any law'—i.e., before I came into the body I lived in that sort of body which is not under ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... entirely to the ancient period of monody. He never had a harmony of combined sounds, nor a scale with intervals permitting combined sounds. He was sufficiently scientific to carry out the intonations of the Pythagorean theory, and when he went beyond this and formed a scale for himself he devised one which did not permit the association of sounds into chord masses; and, more fatal still, he not only invented such a scale, but carried ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... academic teaching. You would not be satisfied with mere results: you want to know and to understand the method by which they have been obtained. You want to follow step by step that glorious progress of discovery which has led us to where we stand now. What is the use of knowing the Pythagorean problem, if we cannot prove it? What would be the use of knowing that the French larme is the same as the German Zhre (tear), if we could not with mathematical exactness trace every step by which these two words have diverged till they ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... omnes posse, Dei jussu: Deficiunt ergo sua culpa, saith Parcus.(160) Si recte probandi facultate destitui nos sentimus, ab eodem spiritu qui per prophetas suos loquitur portenda est, saith Calvin.(161) We will not then call any man rabbi, nor jurare in verba magistri, nor yet be Pythagorean disciples to the church herself, but we will believe her and obey her in so far only as she is the pillar ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... Metaphysics, book I. ch. v., contains an examination of the Pythagorean doctrine which maintains Number to be the Substance of all things:—[Greek: all' auto to apeiron kai auto to hen ousian einai touton ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... the time of Abraham to the age of Moses the old stock was changed by the intermarriage of some of their race with the Egyptians and Arabians. During this period their literature was influenced by Zoroaster, and by the Platonist and Pythagorean schools. This is especially noticeable in the work of Philo of Alexandria, who was born a ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... self-control &c. (resolution) 604. frugality; vegetarianism, teetotalism, total abstinence; abstinence, abstemiousness; Encratism[obs3], prohibition; system of Pythagoras, system of Cornaro; Pythagorism, Stoicism. vegetarian; Pythagorean, gymnosophist[obs3]. teetotaler &c. 958; abstainer; designated driver; Encratite[obs3], fruitarian[obs3], hydropot|!. V. be temperate &c. adj.; abstain, forbear, refrain, deny oneself, spare ,swear off. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... "This Pythagorean inward peace, this deep, untroubled calm, I see daily before me in my Sappho; and struggle to attain it myself, though many a stroke of fate untunes the chords of my poor heart. I am calm now! You would hardly believe what power the mere thought of that first of all thinkers, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... some sensible letters extant under the name of this fair Pythagorean. They are addressed to her female friends upon the education of children, the treatment ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... more and more confused with grapes, till the Renaissance carvers are content with any kind of boss full of seed, but insist on such boss {104} or bursting globe as some essential part of their ornament;—the bean-pod for the same reason (not without Pythagorean notions, and some of republican election) is used by Brunelleschi for main decoration of the lantern of Florence duomo; and, finally, the ornamentation gets so shapeless, that M. Violet-le-Duc, in his 'Dictionary of Ornament,' loses trace ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... observation and words inadvertently let fall now and then. They may be briefly summed up thus: a supreme terror of Evil spirits; a vague principle of the soul's transmigration (a strange degeneration from the primitive conception of the Pythagorean theory). ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... planning a serious attack, accustoming himself to dissimulation, and punishing himself for his blunders by Pythagorean muteness. But he did not tell us the ...
— Z. Marcas • Honore de Balzac
... narrative; and accordingly, in the following age, it was made use of in a direct attack upon Christianity by Hierocles,[278] Prefect of Bithynia, a disciple of the Eclectic School, to whom a reply was made by Eusebius of Caesarea. The selection of a Pythagorean Philosopher for the purpose of a comparison with our Lord was judicious. The attachment of the Pythagorean Sect to the discipline of the established religion, which most other philosophies neglected, its austerity, its pretended intercourse with heaven, its profession of extraordinary ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... established a religious brotherhood in which he sought to realize a high ideal of friendship. His whole plan singularly suggests monasticism. His rules provided for a rigid self-examination and unquestioning submission to a master. Many authorities claim that the influence of the Pythagorean philosophy was strongly felt in Egypt and Palestine, after the time of Christ. "Certain it is that more than two thousand years before Ignatius Loyola assembled the nucleus of his great society in his subterranean chapel in the city of Paris, there was founded at Crotona, in Greece, ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart |
