Socrates

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

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

Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.

Philebus was saying that enjoyment and pleasure and delight, and the class of feelings akin to them, are a good to every living being, whereas I contend, that not these, but wisdom and intelligence and memory, and their kindred, right opinion and true reasoning, are better and more desirable than pleasure

My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you’ll be happy; if not, you’ll become a philosopher.

He is richest who is content with the least.

God screens us evermore from premature ideas.

The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its clothes off.

A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives, by his dress, by his tastes, by his distastes, by the stories he tells, by his gait, by the notion of his eye, by the look of his house, of his chamber; for nothing on earth is solitary but every thing hath affinities infinite.

Some look at things that are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not?

Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion.

Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves – slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.

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

We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting.

Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed.

The silence that accepts merit as the most natural thing in the world is the highest applause.

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.

Covetousness is the greatest of monsters, as well as the root of all evil.

There was the cell where Fr. Eulalio, a thriving lunatic of eighty-six who was castigating himself for unchristian pride at having all the vowels in his name, and greatly revered for his continuous weeping, went blind in an ecstasy of such howling proportions that his canonization was assured.

He liked to like people, therefore people liked him.

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.