Socrates Quotes

(1) One does not actually learn anything new. What we call learning is really nothing but recollecting true knowledge that we already have within us.

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

(3) Beware the barrenness of a busy life.

(4) An honest man is always a child.

(5) He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature.

(6) From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.

(7) The unexamined life is not worth living.

(8) Wisdom begins in wonder.

(9) False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

(10) 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.

(11) Once made equal to man, woman becomes his superior.

(12) If a man is proud of his wealth, he should not be praised until it is known how he employs it.

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

(14) 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.

(15) It is not in human nature to be prepared to go for what you think to be bad in preference to what is good.

(16) If you put me to death, you will not easily find anyone to take my place.

(17) Be as you wish to seem.

(18) Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

(19) The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms.

(20) I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think.

(21) He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.

(22) 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.

(23) 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.

(23) The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.

(24) Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.

(25) Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people.

(26) Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.

(27) Do not do to others what angers you if done to you by others.

(28) The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.

(29) Those who are hardest to love, need it the most.

(30) 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.

(31) To find yourself, think for yourself.

(32) Get not your friends by bare compliments, but by giving them sensible tokens of your love.

(33) The shortest and surest way to live with honour in the world, is to be in reality what we would appear to be; and if we observe, we shall find, that all human virtues increase and strengthen themselves by the practice of them.