Pythagoras

and so Pythagoras said that it is reasonable to help a man take up a burden, but not to help him lay it down.

But Pythagoras said that there was a kinship of all things with all, and a commerce of souls passing into one shape and another.

they say that Plato came into Italy to acquaint himself with the Pythagoreans, and learned all things Pythagorean, and was the first not only to hold the same view as Pythagoras concerning the eternity of souls, but also to bring forward a reason for it.

As for Pythagoras, who held that soul is spread throughout the whole nature of things and passes through it, and that from it our souls are taken, he did not see that, by the tearing-asunder of human souls, the god is rent and mangled, and that when souls are wretched — as happens to most — then a part of the god is wretched, which cannot be.

Aelian has preserved a saying of Pythagoras, “that there are two things, in which man approaches nearest to God, in always speaking the truth, and doing good to others.

How will he persuade me that he was Aethalides and Euphorbus and Pyrrhus the fisherman and Hermotimus, before Pythagoras, in order to persuade me that the living are made out of the dead — he who again perjured himself to be Pythagoras?