Socrates

The envious person grows lean with the fatness of their neighbor.

One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice; and it is not right to return an injury, or to do evil to any man, however much we have suffered from him.

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

Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.

Call no man unhappy until he is married.

We are in fact convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself. It seems, to judge from the argument, that the wisdom which we desire and upon which we profess to have set our hearts will be attainable only when we are dead and not in our lifetime.

That man is idle who can do something better.

A am a great friend of public amusements, they keep people from vice.

The reward of one’s duty is the power to fulfill another.

I tell you there isn’t a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it’s bearing children, and they do that in a poor make-shift way; it had better been left to the men.

The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant. They looked curiously at the costumes we had brought from the wilds of America. They observed that we talked loudly at table sometimes. They noticed that we looked out for expenses and got what we conveniently could out of a franc, and wondered where in the mischief we came from. In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

A jay hasnt got any more principle than a Congressman. A jay will lie, a jay will steal, a jay will deceive, a jay will betray; and four times out of five, a jay will go back on his solemnest promise.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.

There is nothing to fear except fear it’s self.

If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, sir, should keep his friendship in a constant repair.

Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.

It the proof of high culture to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.

The joy in life is to be used for a purpose. I want to be used up when I die.

It takes two to speak truth – one to speak, and another to hear.