Thales' Fall into the Well
event · 2 works · 2 mentions · 2 anchored passages
Thales fell into a pit · Thales' fall into the well
in the texts
Theaetetus
The famous incident in which Thales, absorbed in astronomy, fell into a pit and was mocked by a servant girl, used by Socrates as the emblematic story of philosophic distraction.
While he was studying the stars and looking upwards, he fell into a pit, and a neat, witty Thracian servant girl jeered at him, they say, because he was so eager to know the things in the sky that he could not see what was there before him at his very feet.
Hence it is, my friend, such a man, both in private, when he meets with individuals, and in public, as I said in the beginning, when he is obliged to speak in court or elsewhere about the things at his feet and before his eyes, is a laughing-stock not only to Thracian girls but to the multitude in general, for he falls into pits and all sorts of perplexities through inexperience, and his awkwardne …
Ad Nationes
Anecdotal event in which Thales falls into a well while gazing at the sky.
Rightly, then, did Thales of Miletus, while he examines the whole heaven and walks about with his eyes, fall basely into a well, much laughed at by that Egyptian: