Skip to content

For the circle is divisible into parts unlike in definition or notion, and so is each of the rectilineal figures; this is in fact the business of the writer of the Elements in his Divisions, where he divides given figures, in one case into like figures, and in another into unlike.

Another quote →

Topics

Mathematics

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 →

You may also like

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Kenneth Boulding to Kenneth Boulding in: United States. Congress. House (1973)

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.

William Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)

Pure mathematics consists entirely of assertions to the effect that, if such and such a proposition is true of anything, then such and such another proposition is true of that thing.

Bertrand Russell

The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.

Núria Añó

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.