Pythagoras

Pythagoras’s daughter-in-law used to say that a woman who goes to bed with a man must take her shame off with her shift, and put it back on with her shift.

Pythagoras was wont to say, that our life resembles the great and populous assembly of the Olympic games, wherein some exercise the body, that they may carry away the glory of the prize;

Anaximenes writing to Pythagoras, “To what purpose,” said he, “should I trouble myself in searching out the secrets of the stars, having death or slavery continually before my eyes?

Pythagoras being in company with some wild young fellows, and perceiving that, heated with the feast, they comploted to go violate an honest house, commanded the singing wench to alter her wanton airs;

Pythagoras bought them of fishermen and fowlers to do the same:

Pythagoras borrowed the metempsychosis from the Egyptians;

I cannot easily persuade myself that Epicurus, Plato, and Pythagoras, have given us their atom, idea and numbers, for current pay.

Pythagoras shadowed the truth a little more closely, judging that the knowledge of this first cause and being of beings ought to be indefinite, without limitation, without declaration;

Pythagoras made God a spirit, spread over the nature of all things, whence our souls are extracted;

“For in Pythagoras’s metempsychosis, and the change of habitation that he imagined in souls, can we believe that the lion, in whom the soul of Caesar is enclosed, does espouse Caesar’s passions, or that the lion is he?

and Thales, Plato, and Pythagoras have enslaved him to necessity.

I do not know why I should not as willingly embrace either the ideas of Plato, or the atoms of Epicurus, or the plenum or vacuum of Leucippus and Democritus, or the water of Thales, or the infinity of nature of Anaximander, or the air of Diogenes, or the numbers and symmetry of Pythagoras, or the infinity of Parmenides, or the One of Musaeus, or the water and fire of Apollodorus, or the similar parts of Anaxagoras, or the discord and friendship of Empedocles, or the fire of Heraclitus, or any other opinion of that infinite confusion of opinions and determinations, which this fine human reason produces by its certitude and clearsightedness in every thing it meddles withal, as I should the opinion of Aristotle upon this subject of the principles of natural things;

In this practice and negotiation of science we have taken the saying of Pythagoras, “That every expert person ought to be believed in his own art” for current pay.

The most universal and received fancy, and that continues down to our times in various places, is that of which they make Pythagoras the author;

”And he himself said that he remembered he had been Aethalides, since that Euphorbus, afterward Hermotimus, and, finally, from Pyrrhus was passed into Pythagoras;

Pythagoras says that our seed is the foam or cream of our better blood;

and this fancy seems to have some relation to that of the ancient Pythagoras.

Pythagoras was of opinion that all matter was flowing and unstable;

insomuch that the sage Dandamis, hearing the lives of Socrates, Pythagoras, and Diogenes read, judged them to be great men every way, excepting that they were too much subjected to the reverence of the laws, which, to second and authorize, true virtue must abate very much of its original vigor;

Pythagoras swore By water and air.

O Pythagoras, why didst not thou allay this tempest?

who also never eat any animal food, which I add, forasmuch as it is, peradventure, the reason why they never dream, for Pythagoras ordered a certain preparation of diet to beget appropriate dreams.

Pythagoras, they say, followed a philosophy that was all contemplation;