Quotes About Socrates

I cannot write history unless I travel to the places where it happened. I spent a lot of time walking around the Eastern Mediterranean, going to all the shrines that Socrates would have worshiped at, going to all the battlefields that he fought on.

Socrates learned to his cost, the true nature of democracy is to encourage corruption and excess in all its forms. But the

The greatest danger to both society and the individual, we learn from Socrates, is the suspension of critical thought.

Socrates didn't care to visit the theater, as a rule, except when the plays of Euripides (which some think, he himself had helped to compose), were performed.

Socrates is a doer of evil, who corrupts the youth; and who does not believe in the gods of the state, but has other new divinities of his own. Such is the charge.

But, my dearest Agathon, it is truth which you cannot contradict; you can without any difficulty contradict Socrates.

Socrates was a great walker. They say he was a fiend for exercise. He was absolutely not shut away in some ivory tower somewhere.

And Quell asked, 'Ah, but what is nature?' Socrates answered, sparks showering, 'God surprising himself with odd miracles of flesh.

Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hem-lock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder.

Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock.

Socrates identified the practice of philosophy with personal discussion and questioning, refusing to write anything.

Socrates never raises the question whether there is such a thing as wisdom or expertise.

Socrates is ambitiously searching for understanding of difficult concepts like virtue and courage. But his approach is always to question others, starting only from shared premisses. This kind of ad hominem arguing relies only on what the opponent accepts and what it produces, time after time, are conclusions as to what virtue, courage, friendship and so on are not.

Aporia can not only prepare you to learn but make you want to learn.4 It feels frustrating. In effect Socrates says: good—now get going on the search for an answer, this time with a better sense of the work it takes. You are made hungry for knowledge by discovering how little you have.

Maybe that's what the quasars that stand sentinel at the end of the universe are all about—they are the spots where people like Socrates and Christ dug through; they are windows into bright and terrible wisdom. They are warnings.

This classmate told me that Plato drove this idea home in his dialogue Euthydemus , in which Socrates puts down the Sophists, claiming that a man learns more by "playing" with ideas in his leisure time that by sitting in a classroom. And Plato's successor, that world champion of pleasure, Epicurus, believed in a simple yet elegant connection between learning and happiness: the entire purpose of education was to attune the mind and sense to the pleasures of life.

After illumination," Socrates continued, "difficulties continue to arise; what changes is your relationship to them. You see more and resist less. You gain the capacity to turn your problems into lessons and your lessons into wisdom."  

Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.

The greatest blessings granted to mankind come by way of madness, which is a divine gift. —SOCRATES, ON THE ORACLE OF DELPHI

The philosophy I love is very selective. It is really just the bit that is involved in a search for wisdom, and this means a short roll call of names; Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epicurus, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche.

The Sophists' paradoxical talk pieces and their public debates were entertainment in 5th century Greece. And in that world, Socrates was an entertainer.

Socrates was the best teacher and they killed him!

Philip Kitcher thinks that mathematics is surprisingly like empirical science. Few mathematicians would agree; philosophers too, from Socrates on, have held the opposite opinion.

Now who knows whether Socrates actually undertook what sounds like a pretty lame attempt at becoming a poet in the last month of his life? I'm the mother of a professional poet, and I know what goes into the making of such a creature. You might as well try to become a mathematician or a cosmologist in the last thirty days of your life.