Socrates

If all misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart.

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

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

Our prayers should be for blessings in general, for God knows best what is good for us.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.

Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm and constant.

I don’t like to commit myself about heaven and hell – you see, I have friends in both places.

Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.

Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.

What provokes your risibility, Sir? Have I said anything that you understand? Then I ask pardon of the rest of the company.

The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.

I am a sky gazer. The sky, it pulls at me. Its amazing eternal expanse of breathtaking beauty calls me back to my senses, stretches my awareness, soothes my eyes, opens my heart, stills me. I feel a soft soul longing to be up there, in the vastness, amongst the clouds that are alive and billow and skud and glow; metamorphosing from perfection into perfection. A constantly changing canvas brushed by magic.

Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

There is, indeed, nothing that so much seduces reason from vigilance, as the thought of passing life with an amiable woman.

You cannot run faster than a bullet.

I know that we will be the sufferers if we let great wrongs occur without exerting ourselves to correct them.

There is no comparison between that which is lost by not succeeding and that which is lost by not trying.

The test of a man or woman’s breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.