Socrates

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

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.

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

Worthless people love only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.

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

One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing.

The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him.

Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans –which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.

Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man.

It’s not whether you get knocked down, its whether you get back up.

If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.

The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life.

We must substitute courage for caution.

The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.

We women are always in danger of living too exclusively in the affections; and though our affections are perhaps the best gifts we have, we ought also to have our share of the more independent life — some joy in things for their own sake. It is piteous to see the helplessness of some sweet women when their affections are disappointed — because all their teaching has been, that they can only delight in study of any kind for the sake of a personal love. They have never contemplated an independent delight in ideas as an experience which they could confess without being laughed at. Yet surely women need this defense against passionate affliction even more than men.

The money men make lives after them.

The thirst for adventure is the vent which Destiny offers; a war, a crusade, a gold mine, a new country, speak to the imagination and offer swing and play to the confined powers.

Therefore if a man look sharply and attentively, he shall see Fortune; for though she be blind, yet she is not invisible.

A man’s interest in the world is only an overflow from his interest in himself.

It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years?… What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.

Life too near paralyses art.