Socrates Quotes

“It is better to suffer an injustice than to commit one”

“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.”

“Wisest is he who knows he knows not.”

“The beginning is the most important part, especially when dealing with anything young and tender.”

“The difficulty, my friends, is not in avoiding death, but in avoiding unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death.”

“Be of good cheer about death and know this as a truth, that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death”

“Regard your good name as the richest jewel yoou can possibly be possessed of.”

“Nobody is qualified to become a statesman who is entirely ignorant of the problem of wheat.”

“Wind buffs up empty bladders; opinion, fools.”

“A painter will paint a cobbler, carpenter, or any other artist, though he knows nothing of their arts; and, if he is a good artist, he may deceive children or simple persons, when he shows them his picture of a carpenter from a distance, and they will fancy that they are looking at a real carpenter.”

“Men of Athens, I honor and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy.”

“It has been shown that to injure anyone is never just anywhere.”

“The partisan when he is engaged in a dispute, cares nothing about the rights of the question, but is anxious only to convince his hearers of his own assertions.”

“The perfect human being is all human beings put together, it is a collective, it is all of us together that make perfection.”

“If I can assign names as well as pictures to objects, the right assignment of them we may call truth, and the wrong assignment of them falsehood.”

“The easiest and noblest way is not to be crushing others, but to be improving yourselves.”

“An education obtained with money is worse than no education at all.”

“He is the richest who is content with the least.”

“Philebus was saying that enjoyment and pleasure and delight, and the class of feelings akin to them, are a good to every living being, whereas I contend, that not these, but wisdom and intelligence and memory, and their kindred, right opinion and true reasoning, are better and more desirable than pleasure”

“Before the birth of Love, many fearful things took place through the empire of necessity; but when this god was born, all things rose to men.”

“Marry or marry not, in any either case you'll regret it”

“The shortest and surest way to live with honor in the world, is to be in reality what we would appear to be, all human virtues increase and strengthen themselves by the practice and experience of them.”

“In all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep.”

“The warm love has the coldest end.”

“I know you won't believe me, but the highest form of Human Excellence is to question oneself and others.”