Quotes By Socrates

From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.

Beware the barrenness of a busy life.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

Let him that would move the world first move himself.

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.

Wisdom begins in wonder.

I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good.

I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live.

I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.

The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.

A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

The poets are only the interpreters of the Gods.

As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent.

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.

An honest man is always a child.

Be as you wish to seem.

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

Our prayers should be for blessings in general, for God knows best what is good for us.

To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Worthless people live only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.

One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice; and it is not right to return an injury, or to do evil to any man, however much we have suffered from him.

True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.

It is not living that matters, but living rightly.

All men's souls are immortal, but the souls of the righteous are immortal and divine.

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.

I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.

By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.