Quotes About Wisdom

States will never be happy until rulers become philosophers or philosophers become rulers.

The wise man will want to be ever with him who is better than himself.

Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil.

But I am too stupid to be convinced by him.

Let no one destitute of Geometry enter my doors.

Haven't you noticed that opinion without knowledge is always a poor thing? At the best it is blind—isn't anyone who holds a true opinion without understanding like a blind man on the right road?

Most people are not just comfortable in their ignorance, but hostile to anyone who points it out.

I am smart because I know I nothing.

Socrates: But why, my dear Crito, should we care about the opinion of the many?

SOCRATES: Perhaps we may be wrong; if so, you in your wisdom should convince us that we are mistaken in preferring justice to injustice. THRASYMACHUS: And how am I to convince you, he said, if you are not already convinced by what I have just said; what more can I do for you? Would you have me put the proof bodily into your souls?

There is nothing I like better than conversing with aged men. For I regard them as travelers who have gone a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to inquire whether the way is smooth and easy or rugged and difficult. Is life harder toward the end, or what report do you give it?

Since then, as philosophers prove, appearance tyrannizes over truth and is lord of happiness, to appearance I must devote myself.

I am speaking like a book, but I believe that what I am saying is true.

Beauty is the splendor of truth. (Die Schönheit ist der Glanz der Wahrheit)

I am better off than he is,—for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know.

Rather I think that a man who ... is willing ... to value learning as long as he lives, not supposing that old age brings him wisdom of itself, will necessarily pay more attention to the rest of his life.

Unless, said I, either philosophers become kings in our states or those whom we now call our kings and rulers take to the pursuit of philosophy seriously and adequately, and there is a conjunction of these two things, political power and philosophic intellgence, while the motley horde of the natures who at present pursue either apart from the other are compulsory excluded, there can be no cessation of troubles, dear Glaucon, for our states, nor, I fancy, for the human race either. (473d-e)

And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.

But that we shall be better and braver and less helpless if we think that we ought to enquire, than we should have been if we indulged in the idle fancy that there was no knowing and no use in seeking to know what we do not know;—that is a theme upon which I am ready to fight, in word and deed, to the utmost of my power.

For he, Adeimantus, whose mind is fixed upon true being, has surely no time to look down upon the affairs of earth, or to be filled with malice and envy, contending against men

the creative soul creates not children, but conceptions of wisdom and virtue

For our discussion is about no ordinary matter, but on the right way to conduct our lives.

Even the best of writings are but a reminiscence of what we know...

as a breath of wind or some echo rebounds from smooth, hard surfaces and returns to the source from which it issued, so the stream of beauty passes back into its possessor through his eyes, which is its natural route to the soul; arriving there and setting him all aflutter, it waters the passages of the feathers and causes the wings to grow, and fills the soul of the loved one in his turn with love.