Socrates
161 quotes
Biography
"Beware the barrenness of a busy life."
"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing."
"True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us."
"Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel."
"The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise."
"Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty."
"Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for."
"The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our separate ways, I to die, and you to live. Which of these two is better only God knows."
"The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms."
"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."
"The greatest blessing granted to mankind come by way of madness, which is a divine gift."
"Be of good cheer about death, and know this of a truth, that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death."
"I only know that I know nothing"
"I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled [poets] to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean."
"God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God himself is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us."
"Do not trouble about those who practice philosophy, whether they are good or bad; but examine the thing itself well and carefully. And if philosophy appears a bad thing to you, turn every man from it, not only your sons; but if it appears to you such as I think it to be, take courage, pursue it, and practice it, as the saying is, 'both you and your house."
"For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles."
"Are you not ashamed of caring so much for the making of money and for fame and prestige, when you neither think nor care about wisdom and truth and the improvement of your soul?"
"God would seem to indicate to us and not allow us to doubt that these beautiful poems are not human, or the work of man, but divine and the work of God; and that the poets are only the interpreters of the Gods..."
"Be as you wish to seem."
"The greatest way to live with honour in this world is to be what we pretend to be."
"I only wish that wisdom were the kind of thing that flowed ... from the vessel that was full to the one that was empty."
"It would be better for me... that multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself."
"In every one of us there are two ruling and directing principles, whose guidance we follow wherever they may lead; the one being an innate desire of pleasure; the other, an acquired judgment which aspires after excellence."
"Oh dear Pan and all the other gods of this place, grant that I may be beautiful inside. Let all my external possessions be in friendly harmony with what is within. May I consider the wise man rich. As for gold, let me have as much as a moderate man could bear and carry with him."