interview with Thales
Thales is known best as one of the founders of maths and science, but, like all the 'philosophers' didn't confine himself to 'natural philosophy', as his reported answers to these questions perhaps shows:
What is very difficult?
To know one's self.
And what is easy?
To advise another.
What is most pleasant?
To be successful.
What is the divinity?
That which has neither beginning nor end.
What hard thing have you seen?
An old man a tyrant.
How might a man most easily endure misfortune?
If he saw his enemies more unfortunate still.
How might men live most virtuously and most justly?
If we never do ourselves what we blame in others.
Who is happy?
He who is healthy in his body, easy in his circumstances, and well-instructed as to his mind.
from Diogenes Laertius
2 comments:
Some good ideas there but im not sure about needing your enemies to be more misfortunate than yourself- I would like Peter Gossage to be successful with his new distance learning materials
...but keep them DISTANCE, eh?
I know what you mean - that seemed the most 'unphilosophical' of all the answers. (In a way it's a relief from all tht high-mindedness!)
Of course it was all written hundreds of years after the event, or non-event...
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