Socrates Quotes
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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.
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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.
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Not I, but the city teaches.
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The bad one is that way because of the ignorance, therefore he can be healed with wisdom.
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A disorderly mob is no more an army than a heap of building materials is a house.
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Virtue does not come from wealth, but wealth, and every other good thing which men have comes from virtue.
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Four things belong to a judge: to hear courteously, to answer wisely, to consider soberly, and to decide impartially.
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What most counts is not merely to live, but to live right.
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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.
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One ought not to return injustice, nor do evil to anybody in the world, no matter what one may have suffered from them.
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Through your rags I see your vanity.
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Why should I resent it when an ass kicks me?
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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?
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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.
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Anybody can be a hellene, by his heart, his mind, his spirit.
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When you want wisdom and insight as badly as you want to breathe, it is then you shall have it.
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Nobody knows anything, but I, knowing nothing, am the smartest man in the world.
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When our feet hurt, we hurt all over.
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A man should inure himself to voluntary labor, and not give up to indulgence and pleasure, as they beget no good constitution of body nor knowledge of mind.
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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.
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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.
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The noblest worship is to make yourself as good and as just as you can.
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The examined life is the only life worth living.
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The soul is cured of its maladies by certain incantations; these incantations are beautiful reasons, from which temperance is generated in souls.