To test a perfect theory with imperfect instruments did not impress the Greek philosophers as a valid way to gain knowledge.

Development of Western science is based on two great achievements: the invention of the formal logical system (in Euclidean geometry) by the Greek philosophers, and the discovery of the possibility to find out causal relationships...

They too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape; they’d had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not...

Sexual frenzy is our compensation for the tedious moments we must suffer in the passage of life. ‘Nothing in excess,’ professed the ancient Greeks. Why if I spend half the month in healthy scholarship and...

It is certain that the labors of these early workers in the field of natural knowledge were brought to a standstill by the decay and disruption of the Roman Empire, the consequent disorganisation of society,...

* Pindar, a Thebian Greek wrote (circa 350 B.C.E.) War is sweet to those who have no experience of it. But the experienced man trembles exceedingly in his heart at its approach.

Again, if there are really no fairies, why do people believe in them, all over the world? The ancient Greeks believed, so did the old Egyptians, and the Hindoos, and the Red Indians, and is...

Aristotle’s opinion… that comets were nothing else than sublunary vapors or airy meteors… prevailed so far amongst the Greeks, that this sublimest part of astronomy lay altogether neglected; since none could think it worthwhile to...

Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the...

The Greeks made Space the subject-matter of a science of supreme simplicity and certainty. Out of it grew, in the mind of classical antiquity, the idea of pure science. Geometry became one of the most...