Socrates

To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.

I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.

No man undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the meanest; yet everyone thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades, that of government.

Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.

As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent.

To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they know quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?

Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank. Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

We are stripped bare by the curse of plenty.

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.

Every man will be a poet if he can; otherwise a philosopher or man of science. This proves the superiority of the poet.

All misfortune is but a stepping stone to fortune.

Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.

Think ahead. Don’t let day-to-day operations drive out planning.

Of all the anti-social vested interests the worst is the vested interest in ill-health.

To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning.

Prosperity discovers vice, adversity discovers virtue.

Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.

One isn’t necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise.

Great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.

The fibers of all things have their tension and are strained like the strings of an instrument.