The Golden Verses of Pythagoras

The Golden Verses are a compact set of moral and spiritual maxims transmitted in the Pythagorean school as a rule of life. They prescribe reverence for the divine order, self-mastery, justice toward others, and daily self-examination.

Their most famous instruction is the nightly review — to recount, before sleep, each act of the day, asking what was done well and what fell short — a disciplined practice of conscience later echoed across Stoicism and Christian devotion. Virtue is presented as the tuning of the soul to the harmony of the cosmos.

Read and commented upon from late antiquity through the Renaissance, the Verses carried the Pythagorean ideal of philosophy as a purifying way of life aimed at the soul's ascent.