Philolaus Quotes on Nature
Philolaus of Croton (c. 470 – c. 385 BCE) gave the early Pythagorean tradition its most distinctive natural philosophy in the surviving fragments preserved chiefly through Stobaeus and the late doxographic record. The framework constructs a non-geocentric cosmological model in which the Earth, the counter-Earth, the planets, the Sun, the Moon, the fixed stars, and the heavens revolve around a Central Fire — supplying the earliest extant Greek cosmological system that displaces the Earth from the center of the universe — and grounds the corresponding intelligibility of the natural order in the numerical proportions through which the manifest world is held together as a harmonized whole.
Quotes
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Attributed to Philolaus:
“Number is the bond of the eternal continuance of things.”
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Attributed to Philolaus:
“All things which can be known have number; for it is not possible that without number anything can be either conceived or known.”
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Attributed to Philolaus:
“Order itself is harmony.”
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Attributed to Philolaus:
“The world is one composed of limiters and unlimiteds.”
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“There is a fire in the middle at the centre, which is the Vesta of the universe, the house of Jupiter , the mother of the Gods, and the basis coherence and measure of nature.”
Quoted by Johannes Stobaeus , Eclogues (5th-century CE) Phys. p. 51, Tr. Thomas Taylor , The Mystical Hymns of Orpheus (1824) p.156. -
“Fragment 1. (Stob.21.7; Diog.#.8.85) The world's nature is a harmonious compound of infinite and finite elements ; similar is the totality of the world in itself, and of all it contains. b. All beings are necessarily finite or infinite, or simultaneously finite and infinite; but they could not all be infinite only.”
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