Quotes About Pythagoras

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

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

From Pythagoras (whether by way of Socrates or not) Plato derived the Orphic elements in his philosophy: the religious trend, the belief in immortality, the other-worldliness, the priestly tone, and all that is involved in the simile of the cave; also his respect for mathematics, and his intimate intermingling of intellect and mysticism.

Science is the one culture that's truly global - protons, proteins and Pythagoras's Theorem are the same from China to Peru. It should transcend all barriers of nationality. It should straddle all faiths, too.

Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage—and, foolish as I am, taught thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope.

It seems that mathematical ideas are arranged somehow in strata, the ideas in each stratum being linked by a complex of relations both among themselves and with those above and below. The lower the stratum, the deeper (and in general more difficult) the idea. Thus the idea of an 'irrational' is deeper than that of an integer; and Pythagoras's theorem is, for that reason, deeper than Euclid's.

Pythagoras concluded that ratios govern not only music but also all other types of beauty. To the Pythagoreans, ratios and proportions controlled musical beauty, physical beauty, and mathematical beauty. Understanding nature was as simple as understanding the mathematics of proportions.

Numbers were originally abstractions, invented just to quantify things, to count rocks or people or grapes or whatever. The fact that dust floating in the air & the price of stock options behave according to the same mathematical principles, the fact that everything in the universe apparently can be described or predicted with a mathematical equation-a radical idea when Pythagoras suggested it- is probably the most startling coincidence in the history of mankind.

Pythagore - Selon la tradition, c'est lui qui aurait inventé le mot « philosophie » en disant que seuls les dieux ont droit au beau nom de sage (sophos en grec), l'homme, quant à lui, ne peut qu'aimer la sagesse (philo, en grec, signifie « aimer » et sophia, « sagesse »), tendre vers elle, s'efforcer de l'atteindre.

Philosophers and psychiatrists should explain why it is that we mathematicians are in the habit of systematically erasing our footsteps. Scientists have always looked askance at this strange habit of mathematicians, which has changed little from Pythagoras to our day.

most men and women, by birth or nature, lack the means to advance in wealth or power, but all have the ability to advance in knowledge.

The Pythagoreans... were fascinated by certain specific ratios, ...The Greeks knew these as the 'golden' proportion and the 'perfect' proportion respectively. They may well have been learned from the Babylonians by Pythagoras himself after having been taken prisoner in Egypt. Ratios lay at the heart of the Pythagorean theory of music.

Music, like the visual arts, is rooted in our experience of the natural world," said Schwartz. "It emulates our sound environment in the way that visual arts emulate the visual environment." In music we hear the echo of our basic sound making instrument-the vocal tract. This explanation for human music is simpler still than Pythagoras's mathematical equations: we like the sounds that are familiar to us-specifically, we like sounds that remind us of us.

If Pythagoras were alive today, he would live in the Malibu hills or perhaps Marin County. He'd hang out at health-food restaurants accompanied by an avid following of bean-hating young women with names like Sundance Acacia or Princess Gaia. Or maybe he'd be an adjunct professor of mathematics at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Well, I will wear the bees, like Damon and Pythagoras – ho, a mere sixty thousand bees in the cabin don't signify, much.

Fare thee well. Remain thou still in darkness: thou shalt hold the opinion of Pythagoras ere I will allow of thy wits; and fear to kill a woodcock, lest thou dispossess the soul of thy grandam. Fare thee well.

The greatest thinkers of Greece — Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and later Plutarch and Plotinus — derived their ideas from ancient tradition, and further on from divine revelation.

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.

You know the theorem of Pythagoras?" "The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides." "That's exactly it. And is that true for every example you've tried?" "Yes.

Pythagoras turned his budding cult into exactly what flock-seeking introverts most need—the haven of a tyranny. Ambiguity is a tension-provoker68—and the sheep among introverts go bonkers at the strain. Indecisive grays savage the flockers' limbic systems, so they desperately need the tranquilizer of a world spelled out in black and white.

Pythagoras." "Pih-who?" "He invented triangles.

The numerals of Pythagoras," says Porphyry, who lived about 300 A.D, "were hieroglyphic symbols, by means whereof he explained all ideas concerning the nature of things," and the same method of explaining the secrets of nature is once again being insisted upon in the new revelation of the "Secret Doctrine," by H. P. Blavatsky.

Geometry has two great treasures; one is the Theorem of Pythagoras ; the other, the division of a line into extreme and mean ratio. The first we may compare to a measure of gold; the second we may name a precious jewel.

People joke, in our field, about Pythagoras and his religious cult based on perfect geometry and other abstract mathematical forms, but if we are going to have religion at all then a religion of mathematics seems ideal, because if God exists then what is He but a mathematician?