Philo

Overview

From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).

• “It would be a sign of great simplicity to think that the world was created in six days, or indeed at all in time; [...] Time is a thing posterior to the world. Therefore it would be correctly said that the world was not created in time, but that time had its existence in consequence of the world. For it is the motion of the heaven that has displayed the nature of time.”

• “The health of the soul is to have its faculties, reason, high spirit and desire happily tempered, with the reason in command and reining in the other two, like restive horses. The special name of this health is temperance, that is σωφροσύνη or “thought-preserving,” for it creates a preservation of one of our powers, namely that of wise-thinking.”

• “Bodies have men as their masters, souls their vices and passions.”

• “The legislator of the Jews in a bolder spirit went to a further extreme and in the practice of his “naked” philosophy, as they call it, ventured to speak of him who was possessed by love of the divine.”

• “Nor is it a matter for wonder that the good do not appear herded in great thongs. First because specimens of great goodness are rare, secondly, because they avoid the great crowd of the more thoughtless and keep themselves at leisure for the contemplation of what nature has to show.”

• “As parents in private life teach wisdom to their children, so do [poets] in public life to their cities.”

Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.

Philo across IJR