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Philo

39 quotes

“Are you making war upon us, because you anticipate that we will not endure such indignity, but that we will fight on behalf of our laws, and die in defence of our national customs? For you cannot possibly have been ignorant of what was likely to result from your attempt to introduce these innovations respecting our temple.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A Judge must bear in mind that when he tries a case he is himself on trial.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Allegories of the Sacred Laws (Legum allegoriae), Book I, §2; tr. C. D. Yonge, The works of Philo Judaeus (1854), Vol. 1, pp. 52–53.
“Moses … denied to the members of the sacred commonwealth unrestricted liberty to use and partake of the other kinds of food. All the animals of land, sea or air whose flesh is the finest and fattest, thus titillating and exciting the malignant foe pleasure, he sternly forbade them to eat, knowing that they set a trap for the most slavish of the senses, the taste, and produce gluttony, an evil very dangerous both to soul and body.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The holy Moses … discarded passion in general and detesting it, as most vile in itself and in its effects, denounced especially desire as a battery of destruction to the soul, which must be done away with or brought into obedience to the governance of reason, and then all things will be permeated through and through with peace and good order, those perfect forms of the good which bring the full perfection of happy living.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Moses … takes one form of desire, that one whose field of activity is the belly, and admonishes and disciplines it as the first step, holding that the other forms will cease to run riot as before and will be restrained by having learnt that their senior and as it were the leader of their company is obedient to the laws of temperance.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The road that leads to pleasure is downhill and very easy, with the result that one does not walk but is dragged along; the other which leads to self-control is uphill, toilsome no doubt but profitable exceedingly. The one carries us away, forced lower and lower as it drives us down its steep incline, till it flings us off on to the level ground at its foot; the other leads heavenwards the immortal who have not fainted on the way and have had the strength to endure the roughness of the hard ascent.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The natural gravitation of the body pulls down with it those of little mind, strangling and overwhelming them with the multitude of the fleshly elements. Blessed are they to whom it is given to resist with superior strength the weight that would pull them down, taught by the guiding lines of right instruction to leap upward from earth and earth-bound things into the ether and the revolving heavens.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no sweeter delight than that the soul should be charged through and through with justice, exercising itself in her eternal principles and doctrines and leaving no vacant place into which injustice can make its way.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If one adds anything small or great to the queen of virtues, piety, or on the other hand takes something from it, in either case he will change and transform its nature. Addition will beget superstition and subtraction will beget impiety.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But some, making no account of the wealth of nature, pursue the wealth of vain opinions. They choose to lean on one who lacks rather than one who has the gift of sight, and with this defective guidance to their steps must of necessity fall.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Can we then hold the poverty-in-wealth of the money-grubbing usurers to be of any account? They may seem to be kings with purses full of gold, but they never even in their dreams have had a glimpse of the wealth that has eyes to see.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“τὸν μὲν οὖν τῶν Πυθαγορείων ἱερώτατον θίασον λόγος ἔχει μετὰ πολλῶν καὶ ἄλλων καλῶν καὶ τοῦτ᾿ ἀναδιδάσκειν, “ταῖς λεωφόροις μὴ βαδίζειν ὁδοῖς,” οὐχ ἵνα κρημνοβατῶμεν—οὐ γὰρ ποσὶ κάματον παρήγγελλεν—, ἀλλ᾿ αἰνιττόμενος διὰ συμβόλου τὸ μήτε λόγοις μήτ᾿ ἔργοις δημώδεσι καὶ πεπατημένοις χρῆσθαι.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They in their desire for health commit themselves to physicians, but these people show no willingness to cast off the soul-sickness of their untrained grossness by resorting to wise men....”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Wisdom … never closes her school of thought but always opens her doors to those who thirst for the sweet water of discourse, and pouring on them an unstinted stream of undiluted doctrine, persuades them to be drunken with the drunkenness which is soberness itself.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bodies have men as their masters, souls their vices and passions.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“God and no mortal is my Sovereign.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He who has God alone for his leader, he alone is free.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If one looks with a penetrating eye into the facts, he will clearly perceive that no two things are so closely akin as independence of action and freedom, because the bad man has a multitude of encumbrances, such as love of money or reputation and pleasure, while the good man has none at all. He stands defiant and triumphant.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The good man … has learnt to set at naught the injunctions laid upon him by those most lawless rulers of the soul, inspired as he is by his ardent yearning for the freedom whose peculiar heritage it is that it obeys no orders and works no will but its own.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Homer often calls kings “shepherds of the people,” but nature more accurately applies the title to the good, since kings are more often in the position of the sheep than of the shepherd. They are led by strong drink and good looks and by baked meats and savory dishes and the dainties produced by cooks and confectioners, to say nothing of their craving for silver and gold and grander ambitions.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But you say, “by obedience to another he loses his liberty.” How then is it that children suffer the orders of their father and mother, and pupils the injunctions of their instructors?”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Those in whom anger or desire or any other passion, or again any insidious vice holds sway, are entirely enslaved, while all whose life is regulated by law are free. And right reason is an infallible law engraved not by this mortal or that and, therefore, perishable as he, nor on parchment slabs, and, therefore, soulless as they, but by immortal nature on the immortal mind, never to perish.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One may well wonder at the short-sightedness of those who ignore the characteristics which so clearly distinguish different things and declare that the laws of Solon and Lycurgus are all-sufficient to secure the greatest of republics, Athens and Sparta, because their sovereign authority is loyally accepted by those who enjoy that citizenship, yet deny that right reason, which is the fountain head of all other law, can impart freedom to the wise, who obey all that it prescribes or forbids.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have a very clear evidence of freedom in the equality recognized by all the good in addressing each other.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing will a man rue more than refusal to listen to the wise.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The majority, who through the blindness of their reason do not discern the damages which the soul has sustained, only feel the pain of external injuries, because the faculty of judgment, which alone can enable them to apprehend the damage to the mind, is taken from them.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And yet these things for which we should strive eagerly, things so closely akin to ourselves, so truly our own, we treat with great slackness and constant indifference and thus destroy the germs of excellence, while those things in which deficiency were a merit we desire with an insatiable yearning.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A far greater glory is it to the wise to die for freedom, the love of which stands in very truth implanted in the soul like nothing else, not as a casual adjunct but an essential part of its unity, and cannot be amputated without the whole system being destroyed as a result.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nature … has born and reared all men alike, and created them genuine brothers, not in mere name, but in very reality, though this kinship has been put to confusion by the triumph of malignant covetousness, which has wrought estrangement instead of affinity and enmity instead of friendship.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Noble souls, whose brightness the greed of fortune cannot dim, have a kingly something, which urges them to contend on equal footing with persons of the most massive dignity and pits freedom of speech against arrogance.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This too is a truth well known to everyone who has taken even a slight hold of culture, that freedom is an honorable thing, and slavery a disgraceful thing, and that honorable things are associated with good men and disgraceful things with bad men. Hence, it clearly follows that no person of true worth is a slave, though threatened by a host of claimants who produce contracts to prove their ownership.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As parents in private life teach wisdom to their children, so do [poets] in public life to their cities.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We must mention the higher, nobler wealth, which does not belong to all, but to truly noble and divinely gifted men. This wealth is bestowed by wisdom through the doctrines and principles of ethic, logic and physic, and from these spring the virtues, which rid the soul of its proneness to extravagance, and engender the love of contentment and frugality, which will assimilate it to God. For God has no wants, He needs nothing, being in Himself all-sufficient to Himself, while the fool has many wants, ever thirsting for what is not there, longing to gratify his greedy and insatiable desire, which he fans into a blaze like a fire and brings both great and small within its reach. But the man of worth has few wants, standing midway between mortality and immortality.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If they are unwilling to give, they should at least lend with all readiness and alacrity, not with the prospect of receiving anything back except the principal. … In place of the interest which they determine not to accept they receive a further bonus of the fairest and most precious things that human life has to give, mercy neighborliness, charity, magnanimity, a good report and good fame. And what acquisition can rival these? Nay, even the great king will appear as the poorest of men if compared with a single virtue. For his wealth is soulless, buried deep in store-houses and recesses of the earth, but the wealth of virtue lies in the sovereign part of the soul, and the purest part of existence.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What need is there of long journeying on the land or voyaging on the seas to seek and search for virtue, whose roots have been set by their Maker ever so near us, as the wise legislator of the Jews also says, “in thy mouth, in thy heart and in thy hand,” thereby indicating in a figure, words, thoughts and actions? All these, indeed, need the cultivator’s skill. Those who prefer idleness to labor, not only prevent the growths but also wither and destroy the roots. But those who consider inaction mischievous and are willing to labor, do as the husbandman does with fine young shoots. By constant care they rear the virtues into stems rising up to heaven, saplings ever blooming and immortal, bearing and never ceasing to bear the fruits of happiness, or as some hold, not so much bearing as being in themselves that happiness. These Moses often calls by the compound name of wholefruits. In the case of growths which spring from the earth, neither are the trees the fruit nor the fruit the trees, but in the soul’s plantation the saplings of wisdom, of justice, of temperance, have their whole being transformed completely into fruits.”
Philo (15 BC–50) said by 50 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source