Top 440 Quotes & Sayings by Socrates - Page 6

Our purpose in founding the city was not to make any one class in it surpassingly happy, but to make the city as a whole as happyas possible.

The hour of departure has arrived and we go our ways; I to die, and you to live. Which is better? Only God knows.

I swear it upon Zeus an outstanding runner cannot be the equal of an average wrestler.

The same wind is blowing, and yet one of us may be cold and the other not.

No man has a right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training

In my investigation in the service of the god I found that those who had the highest reputation were nearly the most deficient, while those who were thought to be inferior were more knowledgeable.

It is a base thing for a man to wax old in careless self-neglect before he has lifted up his eyes and seen what manner of man he was made to be, in the full perfection of bodily strength and beauty. But these glories are withheld from him who is guilty of self-neglect, for they are not wont to blaze forth unbidden.

This sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin.

As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent

One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice.

How many things I can do without!

I shall never fear or avoid things of which I do not know.

The soul then, as being immortal, and having been born again many times, and having seen all things that exist, whether in this world or in the world below, has knowledge of them all . . . all enquiry and all learning is but recollection.

It is the greatest good for an individual to discuss virtue (aka areté) every day...for the unexamined life is not worth living.

To fear death is nothing other than to think oneself wise when one is not. For it is to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not even turn out to be the greatest blessings of human beings. And yet people fear it as if they knew for certain it is the greatest evil.

Wisdom is knowing how little we know.

Do you suppose that I should have lived as long as I have if I had moved in the sphere of public life, and conducting myself in that sphere like an honorable man, had always upheld the cause of right, and conscientiously set this end above all other things? Not by a very long way, gentlemen; neither would any other man.

If measure and symmetry are absent from any composition in any degree, ruin awaits both the ingredients and the composition... Measure and symmetry are beauty and virtue the world over.

I desire only to know the truth, and to live as well as I can...And, to the utmost of my power, I exhort all other men to do the same...I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly conflict.

The soul is pure when it leaves the body and drags nothing bodily with it, by virtue of having no willing association with the body in life but avoiding it.......Practicing philosophy in the right way is a training to die easily.

To be uncertain is to be uncomfortable, but to be certain is to be ridiculous.

Such as thy words are, such will thy affections be esteemed; and such will thy deeds be as thy affections and such thy life as thy deeds.

The only thing I know is that I know nothing

This is...self-knowled ge-for a man to know what he knows, and what he does not know.

If you will take my advice you will think little of Socrates, and a great deal more of truth.

You will know that the divine is so great and of such a nature that it sees and hears everything at once, is present everywhere, and is concerned with everything.

He who has lived as a true philosopher has reason to be of good cheer when he is about to die, and that after death he may hope to receive the greatest good in the other world.

The right way to begin is to pay attention to the young, and make them just as good as possible.

The soul is cured of its maladies by certain incantations; these incantations are beautiful reasons, from which temperance is generated in souls.

Nothing is to be preferred before justice.

Philebus was saying that enjoyment and pleasure and delight, and the class of feelings akin to them, are a good to every living being, whereas I contend, that not these, but wisdom and intelligence and memory, and their kindred, right opinion and true reasoning, are better and more desirable than pleasure

To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.

I am that gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you.

The wise man seeks death all his life, and for this reason death is not terrifying to him.

Virtue is the nursing-mother of all human pleasures, who, in rendering them just, renders them also pure and permanent; in moderating them, keeps them in breath and appetite; in interdicting those which she herself refuses, whets our desires to those that she allows; and, like a kind and liberal mother, abundantly allows all that nature requires, even to satiety, if not to lassitude.

The noblest worship is to make yourself as good and as just as you can.

Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.

The real artist, who knew what he was imitating, would be interested in realities and not in imitations; and would desire to leave as memorials of himself works many and fair; and, instead of being the author of encomiums, he would prefer to be the theme of them.

The more I know, the more I know that I don't know.

Wealth does not bring about excellence (aka areté), but excellence (aka areté) brings about wealth and all other public and private blessings for men.

...one thing I am ready to fight for as long as I can, in word and act: that is, that we shall be better, braver and more active men if we believe it right to look for what we don't know than if we believe there is no point in looking because what we don't know we can never discover.

When desire, having rejected reason and overpowered judgment which leads to right, is set in the direction of the pleasure which beauty can inspire, and when again under the influence of its kindred desires it is moved with violent motion towards the beauty of corporeal forms, it acquires a surname from this very violent motion, and is called love.

In order that the mind should see light instead of darkness, so the entire soul must be turned away from this changing world, until its eye can learn to contemplate reality and that supreme splendor which we have called the good. Hence there may well be an art whose aim would be to effect this very thing.

Anybody can be a hellene, by his heart, his mind, his spirit.

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 examined life is the only life worth living.

Wisdom adorneth riches and casteth a shadow over poverty.

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.

Beloved Pan and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and the inward man be one.

Since I am convinced that I wrong no one, I am not likely to wrong myself.

And the same things look bent and straight when seen in water and out of it, and also both concave and convex, due to the sight's being mislead by the colors, and every sort of confusion of this kind is plainly in our soul. And, then, it is because they take advantage of this affection in our nature that shadow painting, and puppeteering, and many other tricks of the kind fall nothing short of wizardry.

The warm love has the coldest end.

So you would rather suffer an injustice than do an injustice?

The duller eye may often see a thing sooner than the keener.

Be of good cheer about death and know this as a truth, that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death

I call that man idle who might be better employed.

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.

Marry a good woman, and be happy the rest of your life. Or, marry a bad, and become a good philosopher

You think that upon the score of fore-knowledge and divining I am infinitely inferior to the swans. When they perceive approaching death they sing more merrily than before, because of the joy they have in going to the God they serve.

YOU ARE NOT ONLY GOOD TO YOURSELF, BUT THE CAUSE OF GOODNESS IN OTHERS