Socrates

Wars and revolutions and battles are due simply and solely to the body and its desires. All wars are undertaken for the acquisition of wealth; and the reason why we have to acquire wealth is the body, because we are slaves in its service.

Slanderers do not hurt me because they do not hit me.

The poets are only the interpreters of the Gods.

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

Whenever, therefore, people are deceived and form opinions wide of the truth, it is clear that the error has slid into their minds through the medium of certain resemblances to that truth.

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.

A wicked fellow is the most pious when he takes to it. He’ll beat you all at piety.

We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.

I am not an Athenian, nor a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.

All excess is ill, but drunkenness is of the worst sort. It spoils health, dismounts the mind, and unmans men. It reveals secrets, is quarrelsome, lascivious, impudent, dangerous and bad.

People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

The only reward of virtue is virtue the only way to have a friend is to be one.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.

All problems are finally scientific problems.

The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.

The sovereign is called a tyrant who knows no laws but his caprice.

Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.

Patience makes lighter What sorrow may not heal.

We must rekindle the fire of idealism in our society, for nothing suffocates the promise of America more than unbounded cynicism and indifference.