Socrates

By all means marry. If you get a good wife you will become happy, and if you get a bad one you will become a philosopher.

What a lot of things there are a man can do without.

The comic and the tragic lie inseparably close, like light and shadow.

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

The fewer our wants the more we resemble the Gods.

Nature has given us two ears, two eyes, and but one tongue-to the end that we should hear and see more than we speak.

If I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior.

The masses have no habit of self reliance or original action.

There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.

Life is what you make it. Always has been, always will be.

I often think that men don’t understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always talk about it.

There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.

Many of the truths that we cling to depend on our point of view.

There is properly no history; only biography.

Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion.

Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man.

A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.

This is the ultimate end of man, to find the One which is in him; which is his truth, which is his soul; the key with which he opens the gate of the spiritual life, the heavenly kingdom.

Train hard, turn up, run your best and the rest will take care of itself.

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistorical acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

During my life, I have had a few nightmares which happened to me while I was wide awake.