Socrates Quotes (137 Quotes)


    There is only one good -- knowledge and only one evil -- ignorance.

    No man undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the meanest yet everyone thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades, that of government.

    I am quite ready to acknowledge ... that I ought to be grieved at death, if I were not persuaded that I am going to other gods who are wise and good (of this I am as certain as I can be of any such matters), and to men departed who are better than those whom I leave behind. And therefore I do not grieve as I might have done, for I have good hope that there is yet something remaining for the dead.

    Wars and revolutions and battles are due simply and solely to the body and its desires. All wars are undertaken for the acquisition of wealth and the reason why we have to acquire wealth is the body, because we are slaves in its service.

    In every sort of danger, there are various ways of winning through, if one is ready to do and say anything whatever.


    Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

    The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him.

    I shall never act differently, even if I have to die for it many times

    By all means marry. If you get a good wife you will become happy, and if you get a bad one you will become a philosopher. Socrates (470-399 B.C.)

    The only true knowledge, consists in knowing, that we know nothing,

    My divine sign indicates the future to me.

    It is necessary that one who really and truly fights for the right, if he is to survive even for a short time, shall act as a private man, not as a public man

    Such as thy words are, such will thine affections be esteemed and such as thine affections, will be thy deeds and such as thy deeds will be thy life

    As for me, all I know is that I know nothing.

    Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

    If thou continuest to take delight in idle argumentation thou mayest be qualified to combat with the sophists, but will never know how to live with men.

    My belief is that to have no wants is divine.

    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.

    I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.

    Nature has given us two ears, two eyes, and but one tongue-to the end that we should hear and see more than we speak.

    Beauty is the bait which with delight allures man to enlarge his kind.

    Get not your friends by bare compliments, but by giving them sensible tokens of your love.

    Often when looking at a mass of things for sale, he would say to himself, How many things I have no need of.

    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.

    Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.

    The soul, like the body, accepts by practice whatever habit one wishes it to contact.

    He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature.

    Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm and constant.

    The hottest love has the coldest end.

    I am not an Athenian, nor a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

    It is not living that matters, but living rightly.

    Happiness is unrepentant pleasure.

    The fewer our wants the more we resemble the Gods.

    Employ your time improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily to what others have labored hard for.

    Socrates is charged with corrupting the youth of the city, and with rejecting the gods of Athens and introducing new divinities.

    Suddenly there were people who came to realize that there must be some things that must be done about the natural environment,

    Contentment is natural wealth luxury, artificial poverty.


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