Quotes by Thales

“God is the most ancient of all things, for he had no birth.”

“The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself.”

“Hope is the poor man's bread.”

“Hope is the only good that is common to all men those who have nothing else possess hope still. ”

“Water is the first principle of everything.”

“Σοφώτατον χρόνος· ἀνευρίσκει γὰρ πάντα.”

“Οὔ τι τὰ πολλὰ ἔπη φρονίμην ἀπεφήνατο δόξαν”

“Ἐὰν ἃ τοῖς ἄλλοις ἐπιτιμῶμεν, αὐτοὶ μὴ δρῶμεν”

“Μέγιστον τόπος· ἅπαντα γὰρ χωρεῖ”

“Hope is the only good that is common to all men; those who have nothing else possess hope still.”

“Placing your stick at the end of the shadow of the pyramid, you made by the sun's rays two triangles, and so proved that the pyramid [height] was to the stick [height] as the shadow of the pyramid ...”

“Do not ask who started it. Finish it”

“Nothing is more ancient than God, for He was never created; nothing more beautiful than the world, it is the work of that same God; nothing is more active than thought, for it flies over the whole ...”

“Thales asserted Water to be the principle of things. For he saw that matter was principally dispensed in moisture, and moisture in water; and it seemed proper to make that the principle of things, ...”

“Thales had a motto — sophotaton chronos aneuriskei gar panta — which means time is wisest because it discovers everything. We still live by that motto — we mark the time and aid the discoveries by ...”

“It seems probable that the early Greeks were largely indebted to the Phoenicians for their knowledge of practical arithmetic or the art of calculation, and perhaps also learnt from them a few prope...”

“It has fallen to the lot of one people, the ancient Greeks, to endow human thought with two outlooks on the universe neither of which has blurred appreciably in more than two thousand years. ...The...”

“It was not Zeno, the founder of the Stoics, alone, who taught that the Universe evolves, and its primary substance is transformed from the state of fire into that of air, then into that of water, e...”

“With regard to the Pythagorean theorem my conjecture is that... it was known to Thales. ...the hypotenuse theorem is a direct consequence of the principle of similitude, and... Thales was fully con...”

“The more one studies the period of Thales—the more one compares the knowledge he bequeathed to prosterity with the one he had found when he began his work—the more does his mathematical stature gro...”