Socrates

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.

Whenever, therefore, people are deceived and form opinions wide of the truth, it is clear that the error has slid into their minds through the medium of certain resemblances to that truth.

I was afraid that by observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my other senses I might blind my soul altogether.

The soul is pure when it leaves the body and drags nothing bodily with it, by virtue of having no willing association with the body in life but avoiding it… Practicing philosophy in the right way is a training to die easily.

By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.

If we live truly, we shall see truly.

Wisdom is like electricity. There is no permanently wise man, but men capable of wisdom, who, being put into certain company, or other favorable conditions, become wise for a short time, as glasses rubbed acquire electric power for a while.

A man is related to all nature.

The line of beauty is the line of perfect economy.

If we had more time for discussion we should probably have made a great many more mistakes.

Real practice has no purpose or direction, so it can include everything that comes.

It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.

Poverty consist in feeling poor.

Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it….

Europe extends to the Alleghenies; America lies beyond.

I have thought of a pulley to raise me gradually; but that would give me pain, as it would counteract my natural inclination. I would have something that can dissipate the inertia and give elasticity to the muscles. We can heat the body, we can cool it; we can give it tension or relaxation; and surely it is possible to bring it into a state in which rising from bed will not be a pain.

Mr. Emerson visited Thoreau at the jail, and the meeting between the two philosophers must have been interesting and somewhat dramatic. The account of the meeting was told me by Miss Maria Thoreau Henry Thoreaus auntHenry, why are you here? Waldo, why are you not here?

Get a black suit and just freeload, problem it’s too God damned late now even to be any of the things I never wanted to be.

The faith that stands on authority is not faith.

No matter how hard the past is, we can always begin again.