Socrates Quotes

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

Knowledge is our ultimate good.

Virtue does not come from wealth, but wealth, and every other good thing which men have comes from virtue.

Every action has its pleasures and its price.

If you want to be a good saddler, saddle the worst horse; for if you can tame one, you can tame all.

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.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm & constant.

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

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.

The life of which meaning one never ponders is not worth living

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

Are not all things which have opposites generated out of their opposites?

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

You never know a line is crooked unless you have a straight one to put next to it.

Do not grieve over someone who changes all of the sudden. It might be that he has given up acting and returned to his true self.

Our prayers should be for blessings in general, for God knows best what is good for us.

I know what I do not know.

The greater the power that deigns to serve you, the more honor it demands of you.

Through your rags I see your vanity.

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.

Those then who know not wisdom and virtue, and are always busy with gluttony and sensuality, go down and up again as far as the mean; and in this region they move at random throughout life, but they never pass into the true upper world; thither they neither look, nor do they ever find their way, neither are they truly filled with true being, nor do they ever taste of pure and abiding pleasure.

Beware the barrenness of a busy life.

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.

There is no illness of the body except for the mind

Do not do to others what angers you if done to you by others.

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

It is possible that a man could live twice as long if he didn't spend the first half of his life acquiring habits that shortens the other half

If you want to be wrong then follow the masses.

Only the knowledge that comes from inside is the real Knowledge

Wisdom belongs in wonder.

True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing. And in knowing that you know nothing, that makes you the smartest of all.

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.

An education obtained with money is worse than no education at all.

The bad one is that way because of the ignorance, therefore he can be healed with wisdom.

It has been shown that to injure anyone is never just anywhere.

All wars are fought for the acquisition of wealth

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

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms.

Do it because it's in your heart. Not because you want something in return. Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.

A free soul ought not to pursue any study slavishly, for nothing that is learned under compulsion stays with the mind.

The universe really is motion & nothing else.

Only the extremely ignorant or the extremely intelligent can resist change.

All things in moderation, including moderation.

What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?

Those who want the fewest things are nearest to the gods.

By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities.