"Thales" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... they say, and I believe their words, 'A pleasure sweeter far than life affords.' Who say? The fools, whose passions prone to ire At slightest causes or at none take fire. ... ... ... Chrysippus said not so; Nor Thales, to our frailties clement still; Nor that old man, by sweet Hymettus' hill, Who drank the poison with unruffled soul, And, dying, from his foes withheld the bowl. Divine philosophy! by whose pure light We first distinguish, then pursue the ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... the myth is transformed into philosophic speculation, but without total disappearance, as is seen in the mystic speculations of the Pythagoreans, in the cosmology of Empedocles, ruled by two human-like antitheses, Love and Hate. Even to Thales, an observing, positive spirit that calculates eclipses, the world is full of daemons, remains of primitive animism.[63] In Plato, even leaving out his theory of Ideas, the employment of myth is not merely a playful ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... difference between the Greek and Roman mind more clearly seen; in none was the form more completely borrowed, and the spirit more completely missed. The object of Greek philosophy had been the attainment of absolute truth. The long line of thinkers from Thales to Aristotle had approached philosophy in the belief that they could by it be enabled to understand the cause of all that is. This lofty anticipation pervades all their theories, and by its fruitful influence engenders that wondrous grasp and fertility ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... admit of interruption; they have been men of absent minds and idosyncratic habits, and have, more or less, shunned the lecture room and the public school. Pythagoras, the light of Magna Graecia, lived for a time in a cave. Thales, the light of Ionia, lived unmarried and in private, and refused the invitations of princes. Plato withdrew from Athens to the groves of Academus. Aristotle gave twenty years to a studious discipleship under him. Friar Bacon ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... interprets: sol nubem sibi praetendens se obscuravit; than which no better explanation has been offered. That we are not to suppose an eclipse of the sun to be signified in the text, is well observed by Bornemann; as Thales had previously ascertained the causes of such eclipses, and had foretold one, according to Herodotus i. 74; hence it is impossible to believe that Xenophon would have spoken of a solar eclipse himself, or have made the inhabitants speak of ...
— The First Four Books of Xenophon's Anabasis • Xenophon
... as 'gold,' 'air,' 'water,' may be employed as singular, collective, or general terms; though, perhaps, as singular terms only figuratively, as when we say Gold is king. If we say with Thales, 'Water is the source of all things,' 'water' seems to be used collectively. But substantive names are frequently used as general terms. For example, Gold is heavy means 'in comparison with other things,' such as water. ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... that its events are posterior, and the heathen sages and historians younger than that divine lawgiver, from whom they all borrowed many things. In the second, he compares the sacred history of the creation, which Julian had pretended to ridicule, with the puerilities and absurdities of Pythagoras, Thales, Plato, &c., of whom Julian was an admirer to a degree of folly. In the third, he vindicates the history of the Serpent, and of Adam's fall; and retorts the ridiculous Theogony of Hesiod, &c. In the fourth, he shows that God governs all things by himself, not by ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... by the ancients as the father both of gods and men, who were said to have taken their beginning from him, on account of the ocean's encompassing the earth with its waves, and because he was the principal of that radical moisture diffused through universal matter, without which, according to Thales, nothing could either be ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... Master of all thinkers next I saw Amid the philosophic family. All eyes were turned on him with reverent awe; Plato and Socrates were next his knee, Then Heraclitus and Empedocles, Thales and Anaxagoras, and he That based the world on chance; and next to these, Zeno, Diogenes, and that good leech The herb-collector, Dioscorides. Orpheus I saw, Livy and Tully, each Flanked by old Seneca's deep moral lore, Euclid and Ptolemy, and within their reach Hippocrates ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them." This is cited as an eclipse allusion by Johnson, who points out that the utterance of this caution preceded by about fifteen years the celebrated eclipse of Thales (585 B.C.). But surely this is far-fetched. I shall be inclined to attach the same criticism to his next citation. Ezekiel employs these expressions:—"When I shall put thee out, I will cover the heaven, and make the stars thereof dark; I will cover the Sun with a cloud, and the Moon shall not give ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... Thales, the founder of the Ionic sect, so celebrated for morality, being asked how a man might bear ill-fortune with greatest ease, answered, "By seeing his enemies in a worse condition." An answer truly barbarous, unworthy of ...
— Three Sermons, Three Prayer • Jonathan Swift
... Solon, who made the Athenian laws; While Chilo, in Sparta, was famed for his saws; In Miletus did Thales astronomy teach; Bias used in Prie'ne his morals to preach; Cleobulus of Lindus was handsome and wise; Mitylene 'gainst thraldom saw Pittacus rise; Periander is said to have gained, through his court, The title ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... starres for a certayn cause: and so longe he went backeward, that he fell plumpe in to a ditche ouer the eares; wherfore an olde woman, that he kepte in his house laughed and sayde to him in derision: O Thales, how shuldest thou haue knowlege in heuenly thinges aboue, and knowest nat what is ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown
... Laertius tells the story of this fable of Thales of Miletus. "It is said that once he (Thales) was led out of his house by an old woman for the purpose of observing the stars, and he fell into a ditch and bewailed himself. On which the old woman said to him—'Do you, O Thales, who cannot see what is under your feet, think that ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... hedge-creepers, Sleeping face upwards in the fields all night, Dream'd strange devices of the sun and moon; And they, like gipsies, wandering up and down, Told fortunes, juggled, nicknam'd all the stars, And were of idiots term'd philosophers. Such was Pythagoras the silencer; Prometheus, Thales, Milesius, Who would all things of water should be made: Anaximander, Anaxamines, That positively said the air was God: Zenocrates, that said there were eight gods; And Cratoniates and Alcmaeon too, Who thought the sun and moon and stars were gods. The poorer ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... theology the case is very different. As respects natural religion,—revelation being for the present altogether left out of the question,—it is not easy to see that a philosopher of the present day is more favorably situated than Thales or Simonides. He has before him just the same evidences of design in the structure of the universe which the early Greeks had. We say just the same; for the discoveries of modern astronomers and anatomists have really ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay |
