Socrates

The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms.

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.

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.

Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?

No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.

Happiness is unrepentant pleasure.

Whenever you wish to do anything against the law, Cicely, always consult a good solicitor first.

In charity there is no excess.

No one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourself.

Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.

There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman for ever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer –committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.

We have only now, only this single eternal moment opening and unfolding before us, day and night.

Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working to another aim.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other; given the upper, to find the under side.

Put on the lights there, now. Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you’re not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos…

Opinion has caused more trouble on this little earth than plagues or earthquakes.

They that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils.

The worst sin… is… to be indifferent.

It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

Your own safety is at stake when your neighbor’s wall is ablaze.

If a man’s eye is on the Eternal, his intellect will grow.