Socrates

The nearest way to glory is to strive to be what you wish to be thought to be.

True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.

Give me beauty in the inward soul; may the outward and the inward man be at one.

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

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

An honest man is always a child.

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

No one can make you feel inferior without your permission.

If government knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply, the population. When it reaches its true law of action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential.

The seven deadly sins: Want of money, bad health, bad temper, chastity, family ties, knowing that you know things, and believing in the Christian religion.

It is never too late to give up our prejudices.

What is called genius is the abundance of life and health.

Friendship increases in visiting friends, but in visiting them seldom.

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

Fortitude is the marshal of thought, the armor of the will, and the fort of reason.

…with the black marble which gives the fireplace the air of a miniature family vault, to suggest early Victorian commercial respectability, belief in money, Bible fetichism, fear of hell always at war with fear of poverty, instinctive horror of the passionate character of art, love and Roman Catholic religion, and all the first fruits of plutocracy in the early generations of the industrial revolution.

Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.

Every mind has a choice between truth and repose. Take which you please you can never have both.

There are German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry.