Quotes About Socrates

Remember that Socrates was put to death because he would not compromise his standards.

Socrates was put to death because he disrupted something that, in the eyes of the Athenian establishment, was working just fine.

the lies of centuries, the lies of love, the lies of Socrates and Blake and Christ will be your bedmates and tombstones in a death that will never end.

As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.

Ahora bien, ¿qué es, oh Sócrates, la vida?, preguntaría yo.

When Socrates and his two great disciples composed a system of rational ethics they were hardly proposing practical legislation for mankind…. They were merely writing an eloquent epitaph for their country.

Socrates, indeed, when he was asked of what country he called himself, said, "Of the world"; for he considered himself an inhabitant and a citizen of the whole world.

Even Socrates, who lived a very frugal and simple life, loved to go to the market. When his students asked about this, he replied, I love to go and see all the things I am happy without.

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

The wisest of you men is he who has realized, like Socrates, that in respect of wisdom he is really worthless.

Not by wisdom do they [poets] make what they compose, but by a gift of nature and an inspiration similar to that of the diviners and the oracles.

But now the giant heads of Plato and Socrates, each with an expression of penetrating wisdom carved on his white features, surveyed the river and the melon beds beyond.

I admire the courage and wisdom of Socrates in everything he did, said--and did not say.

He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing.

Sócrates dijo que para que un hombre sea de valor para el mundo, ha de tener educación.

Socrates' fame spread all over Greece, and the most respected and educated men from all around came to him, in order to enjoy his friendly company and instruction.

Know thyself' was Socrates' challenge, a challenge both to personal memory and to honesty.

It is not only true that the test of knowledge is an acute and cultivated awareness of how little one knows (as Socrates knew so well), it is true that the unbounded areas and fields of one's ignorance are now expanding in such a way, and at such a velocity, as to make the contemplation of them almost fantastically beautiful.

The point is that Socrates was mocking his accusers in their own terms, saying in effect: I do not know for certain about death and the gods—but I am as certain as I can be that you do not know, either.

Socrates learned to dance when he was seventy, because he felt that an essential part of himself had been neglected.

I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create reasonably decent societies. I think that young people who want to understand the world can profit from the works of Plato and Socrates, the behaviour of the three Thomases, Aquinas, More and Jefferson — the austere analyses of Immanuel Kant and the political leadership of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. [The World Is My Home (1991)]

The difference between Socrates and Jesus? The great conscious and the immeasurably great unconscious.

That man is wisest who, like Socrates, realizes that his wisdom is worthless

After they had lost the war with Sparta the Athenians looked for someone to blame. They blamed the old teacher, Socrates. Being a rather groovy guy, he was always hanging around with young people, telling them not to believe in the old gods.