Quotes about Pythagoras

50 Sourced Quotes

The sixth pre-Christian century—the miraculous century of Buddha, Confucius and Lâo-Tse, of the Ionian philosophers and Pythagoras—was a turning point for the human species. A March breeze seemed to blow across the planet from China to Samos, stirring man into awareness, like the breath of Adam's nostrils. In the Ionian school of philosophy, rational thought was emerging from the mythological dream-world.... which, within the next two thousand years, would transform the species more radically than the previous two hundred thousand had done.

Arthur Koestler

Plato's metaphysics grew out of that of Parmenides, together with a strong feel for Heraclitus's account of the physical world as a world of incessant change. His ethics were deeply inspired by Socrates, but his views on the soul also pick up on motifs that emerge in Pythagoras.

Catherine Rowett

I did not attend the services, because it seems to me, as Pythagoras says, the body is the tomb of the soul and that by being born a person has already begun to die.

Philosophers tend to recast the dominant religious doctrines to form a rational deductive system defensible from within the philosophical schools. But Pythagoras's spiritual adventures seem markedly different.

Catherine Rowett

Pythagoras teaches among other excellent doctrines this also, walk not on the highways. This does not mean that we should climb steep hills—the school was not prescribing foot-weariness—but it indicates by this figure that in our words and deeds we should not follow popular and beaten tracks.

That which Pythagoras said to his scholars of old, may be forever applied to melancholy men, A fabis abstinete, eat no beans.

But after these, Pythagoras changed that philosophy, which is conversant about geometry itself, into the form of a liberal doctrine, considering its principles in a more exalted manner; and investigating its theorems immaterially and intellectually; who likewise invented a treatise of such things as cannot be explained in geometry, and discovered the constitution of the mundane figures.

Pythagoras was the first person to call the universe Cosmos, describing it a kosmos. The Greek word means an equal presence of order and beauty.

From the works now extant of Aristotle, and from the system of Pythagoras... we might certainly infer that these philosophers considered the agents of change now operating in Nature, as capable of bringing about in the lapse of ages a complete revolution; and the Stagyrite even considers occasional catastrophes happening at distant intervals of time as part of the regular and ordinary course of Nature.

Pythagoras' idea of the transmigration of the soul is central.

Pythagoras said that this world was like a stage,
Whereon many play their parts; the lookers-on, the sage
Philosophers are, saith he, whose part is to learn
The manners of all nations, and the good from the bad to discern.

Richard Edwardes

In the time of Pythagoras that proverbial phrase Ipse dixit was introduced into ordinary life.

Diogenes Laërtius

What seems certain is that Pythagoras developed the idea of mathematical logic... He realized that numbers exist independently of the tangible world and therefore their study was untainted by inaccuracies of perception. This meant he could discover truths which were independent of opinion of prejudice and which were more absolute then any previous knowledge.

The attentive reader may have noticed that the core period of Jasper's Axial age—the lifetimes of Pythagoras, Confucius, and the Buddha—corresponds almost exactly to the period in which coinage was invented.

In these days of conflict between ancient and modern studies, there must surely be something to be said for a study which did not begin with Pythagoras, and will not end with Einstein, but is the oldest and the youngest of all.

Since when did a mathematician need any tools but his own head? Pythagoras had done well enough with a stick and a stretch of sand.

Robert A. Heinlein

Happy are they that go to bed with grave music like Pythagoras.

Unlike Pythagoras, Empedocles wrote his thoughts down. He was famous in antiquity for his fine poetic style as well as his ideas about the world. Both his style and his ideas come across in the surviving patches of text, and both can be appreciated even in translation.

Catherine Rowett

Whether or not Pythagoras discovered his own theorem, it is certainly true that Pythagoras and his followers acquired a reputation for mathematical and geometrical investigations. They conducted their mathematics in a spatial way that strikes us as strange: numbers were conceived as lines, squares, triangles, and oblongs, laid out as patterns of counters or pebbles.

Catherine Rowett

I have often admired the mystical way of Pythagoras, and the secret Magic of numbers.