"Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them."

Family

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Thematic Reflection

This quotation examines the core nature of Family as articulated by Hypatia. Within historical and literary traditions, reflections on Family provide actionable mental models, challenging individuals to evaluate personal ethics, self-discipline, and daily actions.

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About Hypatia

Hypatia was a Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician who lived in Alexandria, at that time in the province of Egypt and a major city of the Roman Empire. In Alexandria, Hypatia was a prominent thinker who taught subjects including philosophy and astronomy, and in her lifetime was renowned as a great teacher and a wise counselor. Not the only fourth century Alexandrian female mathematician, Hypatia was preceded by Pandrosion. However, Hypatia is the first female mathematician whose life is reasonably well recorded. She wrote a commentary on Diophantus's thirteen-volume Arithmetica, which may survive in part, having been interpolated into Diophantus's original text, and another commentary on Apollonius of Perga's treatise on conic sections, which has not survived. Many modern scholars also believe that Hypatia may have edited the surviving text of Ptolemy's Almagest, based on the title of her father Theon's commentary on Book III of the Almagest.

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More by Hypatia

"Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond."

— Hypatia
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"In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth - often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable."

— Hypatia
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More about Family

"I just... my childhood seems, when I look back, to be largely composed of reading, lying on the bed. I mean, my mother was always shouting, 'Go outside!' But she shouted it at all of us. I think I was just kind of... rather an introverted child, probably."

— Helen Garner
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"I never did quite fit the glamour mode. It is life with my husband and family that is my high now."

— Patty Duke
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"It all starts with the script: it's not worth taking myself away from my family if I don't have something I'm really passionate about."

— Steven Spielberg
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"My father... had sharper eyes than the rest of our people."

— Chief Joseph
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