Skip to content

It is told that those who first brought out the irrationals from concealment into the open perished in shipwreck, to a man. For the unutterable and the formless must needs be concealed. And those who uncovered and touched this image of life were instantaneously destroyed and shall remain forever exposed to the play of the eternal waves.

Another quote →

More quotes by Proclus

If discovery takes place by the soul who keeps silent, how could the flow of language through the mouth be sufficient to bring to light the essential nature of what has been discovered?

Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus (2008)

For this, to draw a right line from every point, to every point, follows the definition, which says, that a line is the flux of a point, and a right line an indeclinable and inflexible flow.

The Philosophical and Mathematical Commentaries of Proclus on the First Book of Euclid's Elements Vol. 2 (1789)

This, therefore, is mathematics: she reminds you of the invisible form of the soul; she gives life to her own discoveries; she awakens the mind and purifies the intellect; she brings light to our intrinsic ideas; she abolishes oblivion and ignorance which are ours by birth.

Proofs must vary. . . and be differentiated according to kinds of being concerned, since mathematics is a texture of all these strands and adapts its discourse to the whole range of things.

Those who have written the history of geometry have thus far carried the development of this science. Not much later than these is Euclid, who wrote the 'Elements,' arranged much of Eudoxus' work, completed much of Theaetetus's and brought to irrefragable proof propositions which had been less strictly proved by his predecessors.

All Proclus quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Proclus (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.