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Ptolemy Quotes

Claudius Ptolemy was a Greco-Roman mathematician, astronomer, geographer, astrologer, and poet of a single epigram in the Greek Anthology. He lived in the city of Alexandria in the Roman province of Egypt, wrote in Koine Greek, and held Roman citizenship. The 14th-century astronomer Theodore Meliteniotes gave his birthplace as the prominent Greek city Ptolemais Hermiou in the Thebaid . This attestation is quite late, however, and, according to Gerald Toomer, the translator of his Almagest into English, there is no reason to suppose he ever lived anywhere other than Alexandria. He died there around AD 168.Ptolemy wrote several scientific treatises, three of which were of importance to later Byzantine, Islamic and European science. The first is the astronomical treatise now known as the Almagest, although it was originally entitled the Mathematical Treatise and then known as the Great Treatise . The second is the Geography, which is a thorough discussion of the geographic knowledge of the Greco-Roman world. The third is the astrological treatise in which he attempted to adapt horoscopic astrology to the Aristotelian natural philosophy of his day. This is sometimes known as the Apotelesmatika but more commonly known as the Tetrabiblos from the Greek meaning "Four Books" or by the Latin Quadripartitum.

✵ 100 – 170
Ptolemy photo

Works
Almagest
Ptolemy
Ptolemy: 8   quotes 18   likes

Famous Ptolemy Quotes

“As material fortune is associated with the properties of the body, so honor belongs to those of the soul.”

Ptolemy

Book IV, sec. 1
Tetrabiblos

“I know that I am mortal by nature and ephemeral, but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch earth with my feet. I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia.”

Ptolemy book Almagest

In some of the manuscripts, the books begins with this epigram (Owen Gingerich, The Eye of Heaven: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, American Institute of Physics, 1993, p. 55).
Almagest

“We consider it a good principle to explain the phenomena by the simplest hypothesis possible.”

Ptolemy book Almagest

Book III, sec 1 (trans. Gerald J. Toomer)
Almagest

“There are three classes of friendship and enmity, since men are so disposed to one another either by preference or by need or through pleasure and pain.”

Ptolemy

Book IV, sec. 7
Tetrabiblos

“Everything that is hard to attain is easily assailed by the generality of men.”

Ptolemy

Book I, sec. 1
Tetrabiblos

“He left in his Optics, the earliest surviving table of angles of refraction from air to water. …This table, quoted and requoted until modern times, has been admired… A closer glance at it, however, suggests that there was less experimentation involved in it than originally was thought, for the values of the angles of refraction form an arithmetic progression of second order… As in other portions of Greek Science, confidence in mathematics was here greater than that in the evidence of the senses, although the value corresponding to 60° agrees remarkably well with experience.”

Ptolemy

Carl B. Boyer, in The Rainbow: From Myth to Mathematics (1959)

“The length of life takes the leading place among inquiries about events following birth.”

Ptolemy

Book III, sec. 10
Tetrabiblos

“To give here an elaborate account of Pappus would be to create a false impression. His work is only the last convulsive effort of Greek geometry which was now nearly dead and was never effectually revived. It is not so with Ptolemy or Diophantus. The trigonometry of the former is the foundation of a new study which was handed on to other nations indeed but which has thenceforth a continuous history of progress.”

Ptolemy

James Gow, A Short History of Greek Mathematics https://books.google.com/books?id=9d8DAAAAMAAJ (1884) p.308.

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