Top 440 Quotes & Sayings by Socrates - Page 7

Wisdom belongs in wonder.

The true Wisdom is in recognizing our own ignorance.

You too must be of good hope as regards death, gentlemen of the jury, and keep this one truth in mind, that a good man cannot be harmed either in life or in death, and that his affairs are not neglected by the gods. What has happened to me now has not happened of itself, but it is clear to me that it was better for me to die now and to escape from trouble. That is why my divine sign did not oppose me at any point. So I am certainly not angry with those who convicted me, or with my accusers. Of course that was not their purpose when they accused and convicted me, but they thought they were hurting me, and for this they deserve blame.

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.

What a lot of things there are a man can do without.

Athletics have become professionalized.

I have good hope that there is something remaining for the dead.

An honest man is always a child. [Lat., Semper bonus homo tiro est.]

Neither I nor any other man should, on trial or in way, contrive to avoid death at any cost.

True perfection is a bold quest to seek. Only the willing and true of heart will seek the betterment of many.

Nobody knows anything, but I, knowing nothing, am the smartest man in the world.

I soon realized that poets do not compose their poems with knowledge, but by some inborn talent and by inspiration, like seers and prophets who also say many fine things without any understanding of what they say.

God desired to be the real maker of a real bed, not a particular maker of a particular bed, and therefore He created a bed which is essentially and by nature one only.

Wonder is the beginning of all wisdom.

I know nothing but the certainty of my own ignorance.

The difficulty, my friends, is not in avoiding death, but in avoiding unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death.

To live well and honorably and justly are the same thing.

If the whole world depends on today's youth, I can't see the world lasting another 100 years.

If thou continuous to take delight in idle argumentation thou mayest be qualified to combat with the sophists, but will never know how to live with men.

Wisdom is knowing when you don't know

Some have courage in pleasures, and some in pains: some in desires, and some in fears, and some are cowards under the same conditions.

The greatest of all mysteries is the man himself.

You are wrong, sir, if you think that a man who is any good at all should take into account the risk of life or death; he should look to this only in his actions, whether what he does is right or wrong, whether he is acting like a good or a bad man.

The nearest way to glory a shortcut, as it were is to strive to be what you wish to be thought to be.

Whoever would have his body supple, easy and healthful should learn to dance.

The fewer our wants the more we resemble the Gods.

Wars and revolutions and battles are due simply and solely to the body and its desires.

The comic and the tragic lie inseparably close, like light and shadow.

I only know that I know nothing

Often when looking at a mass of things for sale, he would say to himself, 'How many things I have no need of!'

Whenever a number of individuals have a common name, we assume them to have also a corresponding idea or form.

But already it is time to depart, for me to die, for you to go on living; which of us takes the better course, is concealed from anyone except God.

If we pursue our habit of eating animals, and if our neighbour follows a similar path, will we need to go to war against our neighbour to secure greater pasturage, because ours will not be enough to sustain us, and our neighbour will have a similar need to wage war on us for the same reason.

I only know how little I know

Creation is man's immortality and brings him nearest to the gods.

'Wars, factions, and fighting,' said Socrates as he looked forward from his last hour, 'have no other origin than this same body and its lusts... We must set the soul free from it; we must behold things as they are. And having thus got rid of the foolishness of the body, we shall be pure and hold converse with the pure, and shall in our own selves have complete knowledge of the Incorruptible which is, I take it, no other than the very truth.

All that we know is nothing can be known.

To know, is to know that you know nothing.

The Spirit is neither good nor bad, it runs where the wild heart leads" "Wisdom begins in wonder.

As for me, all I know is I know nothing.

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 know that I know nothing.

We are in fact convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself. It seems, to judge from the argument, that the wisdom which we desire and upon which we profess to have set our hearts will be attainable only when we are dead and not in our lifetime.

Not by wisdom do they [poets] make what they compose, but by a gift of nature and an inspiration similar to that of the diviners and the oracles.

To give either to any public matter of interest or to any concern of my own, but I am in utter poverty by reason of my devotion to the god .

In every sort of danger there are various ways of winning through, if one is ready to do and say anything whatever.

Well I am certainly wiser than this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of; but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know.

May I consider the wise man rich, and may I have such wealth as only the self-restrained man can bear or endure.

[N]either in war nor yet at law ought any man to use every way of escaping death. For often in battle there is no doubt that if a man will throw away his arms, and fall on his knees before his pursuers, he may escape death; and in other dangers there are other ways of escaping death, if a man is willing to say and do anything. The difficulty, my friends, is not in avoiding death, but in avoiding unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death.

If I tell you that I would be disobeying the god and on that account it is impossible for me to keep quiet, you won't be persuaded by me, taking it that I am ionizing. And if I tell you that it is the greatest good for a human being to have discussions every day about virtue and the other things you hear me talking about, examining myself and others, and that the unexamined life is not livable for a human being, you will be even less persuaded.

My divine sign indicates the future to me.

It was far too cold. The second I got out I had this incredible headache, I'm just not used to it. The last time I saw snow was years and years ago.

There are a great many of these accusers, and they have been accusing me now for a great many years, and what is more, they approached you at the most impressionable age, when some of you were children or adolescents; and literally won their case by default, because there was no one to defend me.

I know what I do not know.

I only know one thing, and that is I know nothing

Whatever authority I may have rests solely on knowing how little I know.

One ought not to return injustice, nor do evil to anybody in the world, no matter what one may have suffered from them.

There are beds and tables in the world - plenty of them, are there not? But there are only two ideas or forms of them - one the idea of a bed, the other of a table.

Before the birth of Love, many fearful things took place through the empire of necessity; but when this god was born, all things rose to men.

I alone know I am wise because I alone know I know nothing.