Philo of Alexandria Quotes

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.

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.

God and no mortal is my Sovereign.

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.

Nothing will a man rue more than refusal to listen to the wise.

A Judge must bear in mind that when he tries a case he is himself on trial.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

We have a very clear evidence of freedom in the equality recognized by all the good in addressing each other.

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.

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.