"Pythagorean" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... edition collects 181 fragments attributed to Epictetus, of which but a few are certainly genuine. Some (as xxi., xxiv., above) bear the stamp of Pythagorean origin; others, though changed in form, may well be based upon Epictetean sayings. Most have been preserved in the Anthology of John of Stobi (Stobaeus), a Byzantine collector, of whom scarcely anything is known but that he ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... this 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 ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 of exploring with great care all ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... of our life, if the fixed centre is always the ego. There are, if I may press the metaphor, other circles with other centres, in which we are vitally involved. And thus sympathy, or love, which is sympathy in its highest power, is the great atoner, within as well as without. The old Pythagorean maxim, that "a man must be one,[53]" is echoed by all the mystics. He must be one as God is one, and the world is one; for man is a microcosm, a living mirror of the universe. Here, once more, we have a characteristic ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... 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 ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... formula reduces the problem to finding one-quarter of the square root of (4 x 370 x 116) -(370 116 - 74) squared—that is a quarter of the square root of 1936, which is one-quarter of 44, or 11 acres. But all that the reader really requires to know is the Pythagorean law on which many puzzles have been built, that in any right-angled triangle the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. I shall dispense with all "surds" and similar absurdities, notwithstanding ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... 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 ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Divine Philosophy, [4] which surpassed, without the aid of science or reason, the laborious virtues of the Grecian schools. The monks might indeed contend with the Stoics, in the contempt of fortune, of pain, and of death: the Pythagorean silence and submission were revived in their servile discipline; and they disdained, as firmly as the Cynics themselves, all the forms and decencies of civil society. But the votaries of this Divine Philosophy aspired to imitate a purer and more perfect model. They trod in the footsteps of the prophets, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... right angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides, [50] are ascribed to him. In memory of the latter of these discoveries he is said to have offered a public sacrifice to the Gods; and the theorem is still known by the name of the Pythagorean theorem. He ascertained from the length of the Olympic course, which was understood to have measured six hundred of Hercules's feet, the precise stature of that hero. [51] Lastly, Pythagoras is the first person, ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... of Providence here introduced, as the most proper to calm and satisfy the mind when under the compunction of private evils, seems to have come originally from the Pythagorean school: but of the ancient philosophers, Plato has most largely insisted upon it, has established it with all the strength of his capacious understanding, and ennobled it with all the magnificence of his divine imagination. He has one passage so full and clear on this head, that I ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... shall be what 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 the work in the seventeenth century. The second greatest contribution ...
— Progress and History • Various
... coming to its culmination. The kin tie, 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 ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... treatises—like | Dense and Rare—are experimental and of | limited value. Historians of the philosophy | of science have little trouble in disposing | these early experimentalist efforts of Bacon. | | His work on sound was somewhat better— | experimental-theoretical. It is a | post-pythagorean theory of harmonics and | still not appropriately analyzed. | Contemproary musicologists like to quote | the passages on sound in NEW ATLANTIS | for being compatible with todays approach | to music. | | By the time of the Novum Organum Bacon | was seeking a more "general theory of ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... Oriental nations had any philosophy distinct from religion. The Germans are fond of tracing resemblances in the early speculations of the Greeks to the systems which prevailed in Asia from a very remote antiquity. Gladish sees in the Pythagorean system an adoption of Chinese doctrines; in the Heraclitic system, the influence of Persia; in the Empedoclean, Egyptian speculations; and in the Anaxagorean, the Jewish creeds. But the Orientals had theogonies, not philosophies. The Indian speculations aim at an exposition of ancient ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... self-restraint, 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. know when ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... 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 ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... at the age of ninety-four. He was addicted to alchymy, and published a book in 1621, entitled [Greek: Lithotheorikos], sive, Nihil aliquid, omnia, &c. In the course of some recent studies in the Pythagorean philosophy, my attention was accidentally engaged by this {300} inscription; and it at once struck me that it was thence that the explanation was to be derived. The epitaph is as ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 77, April 19, 1851 • Various
... victor, treated the whole assembly. Leophron did the same, as Athenaeus reports;(158) who adds, that Empedocles of Agrigentum, having conquered in the same games, and not having it in his power, being a Pythagorean, to regale the people with flesh or fish, caused an ox to be made of a paste, composed of myrrh, incense, and all sorts of spices, of which pieces were given to all ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... 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 ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... that as soone as any one departeth out of this life, he becommeth a diuel if he haue liued well in this world, if otherwise, that the same diuel changeth him into a bufle, oxe, or dogge. [Marginal note: Pythagorean like.] Wherefore to this diuel they doe much honour, to him doe they sacrifice, praying him that he will make them like vnto himselfe, and not like other beastes. They haue moreouer another sort of temples, wherein both vpon the altars and also on the walls do stand many idols well proportioned, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt
... Plato's thought to which they clung was, as we shall find from the Neoplatonists, his physical speculations; in which, deserting his inductive method, he has fallen below himself into the popular cacoethes, and Pythagorean deductive dreams about the mysterious powers of numbers, ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... Proverbs xx. 27, and immortality as a return to the celestial world of pure light. But the belief in the pre-existence of the soul led the mystics to the adoption, with all its weird notions and superstitions, of the Pythagorean system of the transmigration of the soul.' Moses Mendelssohn revived the Platonic form of the doctrine of immortality. Thenceforth the dogma of the Resurrection was gradually discarded until it was eliminated from the Prayer ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... the universe was then in fashion. It was supposed that the earth was the centre of celestial motions, that the sun, the moon, and the stars revolved around the world which we inhabit. Not that the Pythagorean hypothesis was totally forgotten. There were those who believed that the sun, not the earth, is the centre of the great circle in which the heavenly bodies perform their evolutions; but the Ptolemaic hypothesis had the ascendency beyond all doubt; and with this ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... ability of man, as it is discovered 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 ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... unannounced visitation of Montgomery was Sunday at dinner time. He was at once asked to sit down and partake of the chickens and bacon which had just been placed on the table, but here was a dilemma; Sir Richard, although neither a Brahmin nor a Jew, avowed himself a staunch Pythagorean—he could eat no flesh! Luckily there was a plentiful supply of carrots and turnips, and—jelly. But was the latter made from calves' feet? Montgomery assured his guest that it was not; but, added he, with a conscientious regard for ...
— Heads and Tales • Various |
