Socrates Quotes
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I call that man idle who might be better employed.
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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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To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.
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You think that upon the score of fore-knowledge and divining I am infinitely inferior to the swans. When they perceive approaching death they sing more merrily than before, because of the joy they have in going to the God they serve.
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Are not all things which have opposites generated out of their opposites?
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Man's life is like a drop of dew on a leaf.
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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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...one thing I am ready to fight for as long as I can, in word and act: that is, that we shall be better, braver and more active men if we believe it right to look for what we don't know than if we believe there is no point in looking because what we don't know we can never discover.
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To be uncertain is to be uncomfortable, but to be certain is to be ridiculous.
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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.
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The cure of many diseases remains unknown to the physicians of Hellos (Greece) because they do not study the whole person.
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I have lived long enough to learn how much there is I can really do without.... He is nearest to God who needs the fewest things.
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Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm & constant.
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Before the birth of Love, many fearful things took place through the empire of necessity; but when this god was born, all things rose to men.
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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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Let us reflect in this way, too, that there is good hope that death is a blessing, for it is one of two things: either the dead are nothing and have no perception of anything, or it is, as we are told, a change and a relocation for the soul from here to another place.
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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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The alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls. They will trust the written characters and not remember themselves.
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Flattery is like a painted armor; only for show.
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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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I soon realized that poets do not compose their poems with knowledge, but by some inborn talent and by inspiration, like seers and prophets who also say many fine things without any understanding of what they say.
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The individual leads in order that those who are led can develop their potential as human beings and thereby prosper.
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This sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin.
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What most counts is not merely to live, but to live right.