Socrates Quotes

“A disorderly mob is no more an army than a heap of building materials is a house”

“There is no learning without remembering.”

“Beware the barrenness of a busy life.”

“Neither I nor any other man should, on trial or in way, contrive to avoid death at any cost.”

“Prefer knowledge to wealth, for the one is transitory, the other perpetual.”

“You think that upon the score of fore-knowledge and divining I am infinitely inferior to the swans. When they perceive approaching death they sing more merrily than before, because of the joy they have in going to the God they serve.”

“If we pursue our habit of eating animals, and if our neighbour follows a similar path, will we need to go to war against our neighbour to secure greater pasturage, because ours will not be enough to sustain us, and our neighbour will have a similar need to wage war on us for the same reason.”

“Obscurity is dispelled by augmenting the light of discernment, not by attacking the darkness.”

“If you would seek health, look first to the spine.”

“How can you call a man free when his pleasures rule over him.”

“Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.”

“In childhood be modest, in youth temperate, in adulthood just, and in old age prudent.”

“One ought not to return injustice, nor do evil to anybody in the world, no matter what one may have suffered from them.”

“Either I do not corrupt the young or, if I do, it is unwillingly.”

“All wars are fought for the acquisition of wealth”

“From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.”

“The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.”

“Falling down is not a failure. Failure comes when you stay where you have fallen.”

“The rest of the world lives to eat, while I eat to live.”

“Admitting one's ignorance is the first step in acquiring knowledge.”

“When I was young, I believed that life might unfold in an orderly way, according to my hopes and expectations. But now I understand that the Way winds like a river, always changing, ever onward.. My journeys revealed that the Way itself creates the warrior; that every path leads to peace, every choice to wisdom. And that life has always been, and will always be, arising in Mystery.”

“It is a base thing for a man to wax old in careless self-neglect before he has lifted up his eyes and seen what manner of man he was made to be, in the full perfection of bodily strength and beauty. But these glories are withheld from him who is guilty of self-neglect, for they are not wont to blaze forth unbidden.”

“Living or dead, to a good man there can come no evil.”

“We can do nothing without the body, let us always take care that it is in the best condition to sustain us.”

“As for me, all I know is I know nothing.”