It is not difficult to avoid death. It is much more difficult to avoid wickedness, for it runs faster than death.

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

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

'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.

There is no greater magnificence than to defeat oneself. That is the magnificence.

To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?