Quotes About Pythagoras

In fact, by founding the Academy in the year 387 BC, Plato was envisaging a practical pattern of life in retreat that he had encountered shortly before on his first Sicilian journey. Near the city of Kroton (now called Crotone) in southern Italy, he had come upon a commune of hermits doing theory who were followers of the savant Pythagoras, a man of whom it was not known whether he was still a shaman or had already become a mathematician or was both at once.

right man to prepare the citizens of his country, who were facing disempowerment, for the benefits of the vita contemplativa. The transition to reflective existence was worth an error in reasoning: Cicero unhesitatingly created a lofty nimbus for the future Roman spectator by portraying Pythagoras making the many in the stadium into the few in study.

His face was all sharp angles, thin and pointed, like something Pythagoras had doodled on the corner of his scroll before getting on with his theorem.

Pythagoras, when he was asked what time was, answered that it was the soul of this world.

Some are slaves of ambition or money, but others are interested in understanding life itself. These give themselves the name philosophers, and they value the contemplation and discovery of nature beyond all other pursuits.

Ex pede Herculem. "From his foot, [we can measure] Hercules", is a maxim of proportionality inspired by an experiment attributed to Pythagoras.

We know next to nothing with any certainty about Pythagoras, except that he was not really called Pythagoras. The name by which he is known to us was probably a nickname bestowed by his followers. According to one source, it meant 'He who spoke truth like an oracle'. Rather than entrust his mathematical and philosophical ideas to paper, Pythagoras is said to have expounded them before large crowds. The world's most famous mathematician was also its first rhetorician.

And then there is Pythagoras. The legend is that the founder of theoretical mathematics was so outraged when one of his students, the haplessly gifted Hippasus, discovered irrational numbers21 that he sent the poor fellow out on a raft to drown, initiating a venerable tradition of professors mistreating their graduate students.

To me, as to Pythagoras, music is not merely entertainment or amusement...but therapy...for actuating...the healing power that exists within us all: Life Energy.

Jaspers became fascinated by the fact that figures like Pythagoras (570–495 BC), the Buddha (563–483 BC), and Confucius (551–479 BC) were all contemporaries, and that Greece, India, and China, in that period, all saw a sudden efflorescence of debate between contending intellectual schools, each group apparently unaware of the others' existence.

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

Evolution is the Law of Life Number is the Law of the Universe Unity is the Law of God

I do not understand much of geometry and have no head for numbers. I have read Pythagoras, and I disagree with his assertion that man exists simply to observe the heavens. Observing the heavens leads one to contemplate the Creator of the heavens, and is it not more profitable to marvel at Adonai than His works?

Pythagoras took the next important step by subordinating the mere matter of nature to its essential principle of form and order, identifying the latter with reason or the soul.

Pythagoras was a charismatic figure and a genius, but he was also a good self-promoter. In Egypt, he not only learned Egyptian geometry but became the first Greek to learn Egyptian hieroglyphics, and eventually became an Egyptian priest, or the equivalent, initiated into their sacred rites. This gave him access to all their mysteries, even to the secret rooms in their temples.

Pythagoras of Samos, in the later sixth century BCE

Pythagoras apparently wrote nothing, and yet his influence was so great that the more attentive of his followers formed a secretive society, or brotherhood, and were known as the Pythagoreans. Aristippus of Cyrene tells us in his Account of Natural Philosphers that Pythagoras derived his name from the fact that he was speaking (agoreuein) truth like the God at Delphi (tou Pythiou).

In it, Porphyry says about Pythagoras: He himself could hear the harmony of the Universe, and understood the music of the spheres, and the stars which move in concert with them, and which we cannot hear because of the limitations of our weak nature.

Even though it is almost impossible to attribute with certainty any specific mathematical achievements either to Pythagoras himself or to his followers, there is no question that they have been responsible for a mingling of mathematics, philosophy of life, and religion unparalleled in history. In this respect it is perhaps interesting to note the historical coincidence that Pythagoras was a contemporary of Buddha and Confucius.

Pythagoras, the teacher, paid his student three oboli for each lesson he attended

The problem looks so straightforward because it is based on the one piece of mathematics that everyone can remember – Pythagoras' theorem: In a right-angled triangle the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.

Even after Pythagoras's death a member of the Brotherhood was drowned for breaking his oath—he publicly announced the discovery of a new regular solid, the dodecahedron, constructed from twelve regular pentagons.

The most momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.

For Pythagoras as for Kepler, the two kinds of contemplation were twins; for them philosophy and religion were motivated by the same longing : to catch glimpses of eternity through the window of time.