Socrates Quotes
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Regard your good name as the richest jewel you can possibly be possessed of - for credit is like fire; when once you have kindled it you may easily preserve it, but if you once extinguish it, you will find it an arduous task to rekindle it again. The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.
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If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.
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Is it not, then, better to be ridiculous and friendly than clever and hostile?
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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.
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And the same things look bent and straight when seen in water and out of it, and also both concave and convex, due to the sight's being mislead by the colors, and every sort of confusion of this kind is plainly in our soul. And, then, it is because they take advantage of this affection in our nature that shadow painting, and puppeteering, and many other tricks of the kind fall nothing short of wizardry.
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Beauty comes first. Victory is secondary. What matters is joy.
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The best seasoning for food is hunger; for drink, thirst.
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My divine sign indicates the future to me.
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I was afraid that by observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my other senses I might blind my soul altogether.
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Only the extremely ignorant or the extremely intelligent can resist change.
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If I had engaged in politics, O men of Athens, I should have perished long ago, and done no good either to you or to myself.
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To fear death is nothing other than to think oneself wise when one is not. For it is to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not even turn out to be the greatest blessings of human beings. And yet people fear it as if they knew for certain it is the greatest evil.
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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?
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The partisan when he is engaged in a dispute, cares nothing about the rights of the question, but is anxious only to convince his hearers of his own assertions.
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By all implies marry if you get a great wife-husband, you are going to be pleased. If you get a bad a single, you are going to become a philosopher.
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For who is there but you? - who not only claim to be a good man and a gentleman, for many are this, and yet have not the power of making others good. Whereas you are not only good yourself, but also the cause of goodness in others.
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I call that man idle who might be better employed.
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The soul then, as being immortal, and having been born again many times, and having seen all things that exist, whether in this world or in the world below, has knowledge of them all . . . all enquiry and all learning is but recollection.
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The tongue of a fool is the key of his counsel, which, in a wise man, wisdom hath in keeping.
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My friend...care for your psyche...know thyself, for once we know ourselves, we may learn how to care for ourselves.
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In all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep.
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To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.
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If you would seek health, look first to the spine.
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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.