Socrates Quotes
Let he who would move the world, first complete an environmental impact assessment and a 90-day public comment period.
The end of life is to be like unto God; and the soul following God, will be like unto Him; He being the beginning, middle, and end of all things.
Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued." "It is not living that matters, but living rightly. The unexamined life is not worth living.
A free soul ought not to pursue any study slavishly, for nothing that is learned under compulsion stays with the mind.
Nobody knows what death is, nor whether to man it is perchance the greatest of blessings, yet people fear it as if they surely knew it to be the worse of evils.
One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice.
I have lived long enough to learn how much there is I can really do without.... He is nearest to God who needs the fewest things.
I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good.
I am confident that there truly is such a thing as living again, that the living spring from the dead, and that the souls of the dead are in existence.
I have not sought during my life to amass wealth and to adorn my body, but I have sought to adorn my soul with the jewels of wisdom, patience, and above all with a love of liberty.
Whenever, therefore, people are deceived and form opinions wide of the truth, it is clear that the error has slid into their minds through the medium of certain resemblances to that truth.
Nobody is qualified to become a statesman who is entirely ignorant of the problem of wheat.
The tongue of a fool is the key of his counsel, which, in a wise man, wisdom hath in keeping.
I prefer to be refuted than to refute, for it is a greater good for oneself to be freed from the greatest evil than to free another.
The Delphic Oracle said I was the wisest of all the Greeks. It is because that I alone, of all the Greeks, know that I know nothing.
Every pleasure or pain has a sort of rivet with which it fastens the soul to the body and pins it down and makes it corporeal, accepting as true whatever the body certifies.
May I consider the wise man rich, and may I have such wealth as only the self-restrained man can bear or endure.
The alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls. They will trust the written characters and not remember themselves.
To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know.
The partisan when he is engaged in a dispute, cares nothing about the rights of the question, but is anxious only to convince his hearers of his own assertions.
It is not difficult to avoid death. It is much more difficult to avoid wickedness, for it runs faster than death.
Listen not to a tale-bearer or slanderer, for he tells thee nothing out of good-will; but as he discovereth of the secrets of others, so he will of thine in turn.
There is a doctrine whispered in secret that a man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door and run away; this is a great mystery which I do not quite understand.
Virtue does not come from wealth, but wealth, and every other good thing which men have comes from virtue.
