As long as Man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings, he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other.
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"The soul is immortal and undergoes transmigration."
"Geometry is knowledge of the eternally existent."
"Friendship is one soul in two bodies."
"Truth is so great a perfection, that if God would render himself visible to men, he would choose light for his body and truth for his soul."
"A fool is known by his speech, and a wise man by silence."
Greek philosopher and mathematician whose school in Croton combined geometry (the Pythagorean theorem), number-mysticism, and a religious-vegetarian way of life. Closely associated with Thales of Miletus (earlier pre-Socratic and the first philosopher). For an intellectual contrast, see Heraclitus, pre-Socratic Greek philosopher of flux — Heraclitus called Pythagoras 'the chief of swindlers' — among the founding insults of the philosophical-rivalry tradition. Their 'all is flux' vs 'all is number' poles still organize the philosophy of mathematics today (Platonist vs anti-realist).
A central argument for Pythagorean vegetarianism, widely attributed.
Date: c. 570-495 BCE
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This quote argues that human brutality toward animals and human violence against each other are morally inseparable. Cruelty to living beings corrupts a person's character and erodes their capacity for peace. Those who normalize killing will extend that violence toward other humans. It is an early ethical case for nonviolence, asserting that inner peace and social harmony require extending compassion to all living creatures, not just fellow humans.
Pythagoras was one of antiquity's most famous vegetarians — his practice was called the Pythagorean diet for two millennia. He believed in metempsychosis: the soul's transmigration between humans and animals, making animal killing a potential offense against a human soul in another form. His school in Croton enforced strict dietary rules. This quote directly expresses his conviction that ethical treatment of animals was inseparable from philosophical integrity and spiritual health.
In 6th-century BCE Greece, animal sacrifice was central to religious and civic life — temples depended on it, gods demanded it, and festivals featured mass slaughter as sacred duty. Pythagoras's vegetarianism was radically countercultural. This was also the Axial Age, when thinkers across Greece, India, and China were independently questioning inherited violence and developing ethics of compassion. His words reframed what most Greeks considered piety as a source of moral corruption.
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