Quotes from Socrates

My plainness of speech makes them hate me, and what is their hatred but a proof that I am speaking the truth.

One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice; and it is not right to return an injury, or to do evil to any man, however much we have suffered from him.

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?

Give me beauty in the inward soul; may the outward and the inward man be at one.

Well, although I do not suppose that either of us know anything really beautiful & good, I am better off than he is- for he knows nothing & thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know.

To express oneself badly is not only faulty as far as the language goes, but does some harm to the soul.

He is not only idle who does nothing, but he is idle who might be better employed.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny

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.

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.

The ancient Oracle said that I was the wisest of all the Greeks. It is because I alone, of all the Greeks, know that I know nothing.

It is a disgrace to grow old through sheer carelessness before seeing what manner of man you may become by developing your bodily strength and beauty to their highest limit.

Are you not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money and honour and reputation, and caring so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul?

The more I know, the more I realize I know nothing.

Be true to thine own self

May the inward and outward man be as one.

Smart people learn from everything and everyone, average people from their experiences, stupid people already have all the answers.

Be as you wish to seem

As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent.

A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.

Now the hour to part has come. I go to die, you go to live. Which of us goes to the better lot is known to no one, except the god.

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 ...

An unconsidered life is not one worth living.

The true champion of justice, if he intends to survive even for a short time, must necessarily confine himself to private life and leave politics alone.