Socrates

To find yourself, think for yourself.

Whom do I call educated? First, those who manage well the circumstances they encounter day by day. Next, those who are decent and honorable in their intercourse with all men, bearing easily and good naturedly what is offensive in others and being as agreeable and reasonable to their associates as is humanly possible to be… those who hold their pleasures always under control and are not ultimately overcome by their misfortunes… those who are not spoiled by their successes, who do not desert their true selves but hold their ground steadfastly as wise and sober — minded men.

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

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.

Once made equal to man, woman becomes his superior.

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.

To find yourself, think for yourself.

Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.

I’m not concerned with your liking or disliking me. All I ask is that you respect me as a human being.

Perhaps his might be one of the natures where a wise estimate of consequences is fused in the fires of that passionate belief which determines the consequences it believes in.

Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.

We had the sky up there, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss whether they was made or just happened.

It may be that we shall, by a process of sublime irony, have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.

A man cannot free himself by any self-denying ordinances, neither by water nor potatoes, nor by violent possibilities, by refusing to swear, refusing to pay taxes, by going to jail, or by taking another man’s crops or squatting on his land. By none of these ways can he free himself; no, nor by paying his debts with money; only by obedience to his own genius.

To be innocent is to be not guilty; but to be virtuous is to overcome our evil inclinations.

It is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.

The power of daring anything their fancy suggest, as always been conceded to the painter and the poet.

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not an example.

Justice though moving with tardy pace, has seldom failed to overtake the wicked in their flight.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but the capacity to act despite our fears.