Quotes By Socrates

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

An honest man is always a child.

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.

Be as you wish to seem.