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Pythagorean   Listen
adjective
Pythagorean  adj.  Of or pertaining to Pythagoras (a Greek philosopher, born about 582 b. c.), or his philosophy. "The central thought of the Pythagorean philosophy is the idea of number, the recognition of the numerical and mathematical relations of things."
Pythagorean proposition (Geom.), the theorem that the square described upon the hypothenuse of a plane right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares described upon the other two sides.
Pythagorean system (Astron.), the commonly received system of astronomy, first taught by Pythagoras, and afterward revived by Copernicus, whence it is also called the Copernican system.
Pythagorean letter. See Y.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Pythagorean" Quotes from Famous Books



... designers. His satire is something quite apart from his caricature, and the former is characterized by a strong dramatic element particularly noticeable in serious illustrations, such as his designs to "The Pythagorean," in the second volume of "Once a Week." In caricature he resumes in a measure the manner of the older caricaturists, without retaining a trace of their vulgarity, and a good example will be found in his cartoon of What Nicholas heard in the Shell (1854), in which ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt

... 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 probably wrote towards the end of the fifth century, ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus

... historical course of this faculty ramified into two classes of research, which were at that time objective, the Ionic and the Pythagorean schools. In the former, the phenomenon and nature were assumed to be the direct object of knowledge, while in the latter the object in view was the idea and harmony of things. Influenced by earlier and popular traditions, ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli

... they should not, it is plain experience would be against them. So that personal identity, reaching no further than consciousness reaches, a pre-existent spirit not having continued so many ages in a state of silence, must needs make different persons. Suppose a Christian Platonist or a Pythagorean should, upon God's having ended all his works of creation the seventh day, think his soul hath existed ever since; and should imagine it has revolved in several human bodies; as I once met with one, ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke

... language, though not the whole, is perhaps at present the most important element in our knowledge of it. It is not impossible that some numerical laws may be found to have a place in the relations of mind and matter, as in the rest of nature. The old Pythagorean fancy that the soul 'is or has in it harmony' may in some degree be realized. But the indications of such numerical harmonies are faint; either the secret of them lies deeper than we can discover, or ...
— Theaetetus • Plato

... together at their club in Waterloo Place, the Pythagorean, a much humbler establishment than that patronized by Scott, and one that was dignified by no politics. After dinner, as they sat over their pint of sherry, Alaric made ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope

... man [Greek: ho Phronimos] would determine.' Such is the doctrine of the Mean, which combines the practical matter-of-fact quality of moderation, recognized by all sages, with a high and abstract conception, starting from the Pythagorean remark quoted by Aristotle, 'the Infinite, or Indefinite, is evil, the Finite or the Definite is good,' and re-appearing in Plato as 'conformity to measure' [Greek: metriotaes], by which he (Plato) proposes to discriminate ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain

... People belonged to a clan or served some local prince. Similarly in religious matters they followed some teacher or worshipped some god, and in either case if they were in earnest they tended to become members of a society. Societies such as the Pythagorean and Orphic brotherhoods were also common in Greece from the sixth century B.C. onwards but the result was small, for the genius of the Greeks turned towards politics and philosophy. But in India, where politics had strangely little attraction for the cultured classes, energy and intelligence found ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... Deficiunt ergo sua culpa, saith Parcus.(160) 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 pillar and ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie

... 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 ...
— Progress and History • Various

... replied, "with the unexplained Pythagorean symbol touching abstinence from beans. Perhaps future ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... Pythagorean teaching, the human soul emanates from the Soul of the World, thus affirming, at the outset, the divine nature of the former. It teaches subsequently that this soul assumes successive bodies until it has fully evolved and completed the ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal

... here declare freely—in order that I may not be suspected of secret connivance, which is foreign to my nature—that M. Leroux has my full sympathy. Not that I am a believer in his quasi-Pythagorean philosophy (upon this subject I should have more than one observation to submit to him, provided a veteran covered with stripes would not despise the remarks of a conscript); not that I feel bound to this author by any special ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... Cargill, "you are like to have a Pythagorean entertainment; but you are a traveller, and have doubtless been in your time thankful for bread ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott

... Ss[)u]-ma Ch'ien's work. The Li Chi, or Book of Rites, which now forms part of the Confucian Canon, is however a comparatively modern compilation, dating only from the 1st century B.C. (2) The extraordinary similarities between the Chinese and Pythagorean systems of music force the conclusion that one of these must necessarily have been derived from the other. The Jesuit Fathers jumped to the conclusion that the Greeks borrowed their art from the Chinese; but it is now common knowledge that ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various

... 91, quoted by Blomfield: [Greek: ten pepromenen moiren adynata esti apophygeein kai to theo]. On this Pythagorean notion of AEschylus ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus

... 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 a Mathematical ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... self-denial, 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 one has had enough, know one's ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... is universally granted that Ennius, though an Italian, was excellently learned in the Greek language. His verses were stuffed with fragments of it, even to a fault; and he himself believed, according to the Pythagorean opinion, that the soul of Homer was transfused into him, which Persius observes in his sixth satire—postquam destertuit esse Maeonides. But this being only the private opinion of so inconsiderable a man as I am, I leave it ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden

... are some sensible letters extant under the name of this fair Pythagorean. They are addressed to her female friends upon the education of children, the treatment of ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... 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 ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside

... the origin of things, inasmuch as Goodness is only found as an attribute of things. Therefore, the idea of Good must be secondary to some other more fundamental principle of existence. This unit Speusippus attempted to find in the Pythagorean number-theory. From it he deduced three principles, one for numbers, one for magnitude, one for the soul. The Deity he conceived as that living force which rules all and resides everywhere. Xenocrates, though like Speusippus infected with Pythagoreanism, was the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... 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 the fact ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney

... his knees in his coat-tails—'I doubt whether you have given much attention to the subject lately discussed by the Boston Dodo Society of Pythagorean Research.' ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers

... And yet thy spirit, indwelling in me, had driven from the chamber of my soul all lust of earthly success, and with thine eye ever upon me, there could be no place left for sacrilege. For thou didst daily repeat in my ear and instil into my mind the Pythagorean maxim, "Follow after God." It was not likely, then, that I should covet the assistance of the vilest spirits, when thou wert moulding me to such an excellence as should conform me to the likeness of God. Again, the innocency ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius

... conclusion," said Tinto; "I hate it, Peter, as I hate an unfilled can. I grant you, indeed, that speech is a faculty of some value in the intercourse of human affairs, and I will not even insist on the doctrine of that Pythagorean toper, who was of opinion that over a bottle speaking spoiled conversation. But I will not allow that a professor of the fine arts has occasion to embody the idea of his scene in language, in order to impress ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott

... the founder of the Pythagorean philosophy, is the third of those earlier masters, who explain the intellectual confirmation of Plato by way of antecedent. What he said, or was believed to have said, is almost everywhere in the very texture of Platonic philosophy, as vera vox, an authority with prescript ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater

... would not be satisfied with mere results: you want to know and to understand the method by which they have been obtained. You want to follow step by step that glorious progress of discovery which has led us to where we stand now. What is the use of knowing the Pythagorean problem, if we cannot prove it? What would be the use of knowing that the French larme is the same as the German Zhre (tear), if we could not with mathematical exactness trace every step by which these two words have diverged till they became ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller

... 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 ...
— Heads and Tales • Various

... and (as our critics say) a second Homer, seems lightly to regard what becomes of his promises and Pythagorean dreams. Is not Naevius in people's hands, and sticking almost fresh in their memory? So sacred is every ancient poem. As often as a debate arises, whether this poet or the other be preferable; Pacuvius bears away the character of a learned, Accius, of a lofty writer; Afranius' gown is said to ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace

... Glossa Ordinaria [that is, the official explanation], and the phrase Glossa dicit (the Gloss says), was as common and decisive on their lips as anciently the phrase Ipse dixit (he, viz., the teacher, has said) in the Pythagorean school." (III, 15.) ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau

... 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 a means of warding off evil spirits ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... the cut and the white or shiny line of the creases, assigned the date of the purchase some three years back. The roomy garments failed to disguise the lean proportions of the wearer, due apparently rather to constitution than to a Pythagorean regimen, for the worthy man was endowed with thick lips and a sensual mouth; and when he smiled, displayed a set of white teeth which would have done credit to ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac

... the practical aspect of the noblest reality in man—that which most directly represents Him in whose image he is made—it has found doctrinal expression more or less perfect from the earliest times. The older Theosophies and Philosophies—Gymnosophist and Cynic, Chaldaic and Pythagorean, Epicurean and Stoic, Platonist and Eclectic—were all attempts to embody it in teaching, and to carry it out in life. They saw, indeed, but imperfectly, and their expressions of the truth are all one-sided ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown

... so be-rhimed since Pythagoras's time, that I was an Irish rat] Rosalind is a very learned lady. She alludes to the Pythagorean doctrine, which teaches that souls transmigrate from one animal to another, and relates that in his time she was an Irish rat, and by some metrical charm was rhymed to death. The power of killing rats with rhymes Donne mentions ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson

... stirs up the molecules into activity. This is the "Word" which St. John says was in the beginning (the plane of causation); in another sense it is the Akasa of occult science, the element of sound, it is the Pythagorean "music of the spheres." The universe is built up, moulded and sustained by this element which is everywhere present, though inaudible by most men at this stage of evolution. It is not sound by the physical ears, but deep in the heart sometimes ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell

... the souls departed, they will answere that they be immortall, and 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

... years of profound meditation and thought, Copernicus, in a treatise entitled 'De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium,' propounded a new theory, or, more correctly speaking, revived the ancient Pythagorean system of the universe. This great work, which he dedicated to Pope Paul III., was completed in 1530; but he could not be prevailed upon to have it published until 1543, the year in which he died. In 1542 Copernicus had an apoplectic seizure, followed by paralysis ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard

... 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. ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon

... injunction to live in a garret, which I have found frequently visited by the echo and the wind. Nor was the tradition wholly obliterated in the age of Augustus, for Tibullus evidently congratulates himself upon his garret, not without some allusion to the Pythagorean precept: ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson

... and scientific study of natural phenomena must always lead to a certain Pythagorean habit of thought. When a string of a certain length is struck, a particular sound is produced. If the string is shortened in certain numeric proportions, other sounds will be produced. The pitch of the sounds may be expressed in figures. Physics ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner

... of our ancient faith must be served, and served too by others than the stolid and soulless things that are but as pegs and hooks whereon to hang the fillet and the robe. Remember two sayings of Sextus the Pythagorean, sayings borrowed from the lore of Egypt. The first is, "Speak not of God to the multitude"; the second is, "The man worthy of God is a god among men." As Genius gave to the ministers of Egypt worship, that ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton



Words linked to "Pythagorean" :   Pythagoras



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