Socrates Quotes
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I know nothing but the certainty of my own ignorance.
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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.
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Talk in order that I may see you.
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God does not deal directly with man: it is by means of spirits that all the intercourse and communication of gods with men, both in waking life and in sleep, is carried on.
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I shall never fear or avoid things of which I do not know.
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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.
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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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The soul is cured of its maladies by certain incantations; these incantations are beautiful reasons, from which temperance is generated in souls.
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There is a doctrine whispered in secret that a man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door and run away; this is a great mystery which I do not quite understand.
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When you propose ridiculous things to believe, too many men will choose to believe nothing at all.
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The envious person grows lean with the fatness of their neighbor.
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The invention of writing will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.
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Let he who would move the world, first complete an environmental impact assessment and a 90-day public comment period.
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Men of Athens, I honor and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy.
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Though flattery blossoms like friendship, yet there is a vast difference in the fruit.
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When I was young, I believed that life might unfold in an orderly way, according to my hopes and expectations. But now I understand that the Way winds like a river, always changing, ever onward.. My journeys revealed that the Way itself creates the warrior; that every path leads to peace, every choice to wisdom. And that life has always been, and will always be, arising in Mystery.
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If you want to be a good saddler, saddle the worst horse; for if you can tame one, you can tame all.
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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.
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The duller eye may often see a thing sooner than the keener.
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The friend must be like money, that before you need it, the value is known.
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All of the wisdom of this world is but a tiny raft upon which we must set sail when we leave this earth. If only there was a firmer foundation upon which to sail, perhaps some divine word.
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Either I do not corrupt the young or, if I do, it is unwillingly.
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Whenever any one informs us that he has found a man who knows all the arts, and all things else that anybody knows, and every single thing with a higher degree of accuracy than any other man - whoever tells us this, I think that we can only imagine him to be a simple creature who is likely to have been deceived by some wizard or actor whom he met, and whom he thought all-knowing, because he himself was unable to analyse the nature of knowledge and ignorance and imitation.
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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.