Socrates

Fame is the perfume of heroic deeds.

The poets are only the interpreters of the Gods.

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

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

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.

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

My chief want in life is someone who shall make me do what I can.

Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.

Help a man against his will and you do the same as murder him.

There is in the act of preparing, the moment you start caring.

No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water.

It is hard to go beyond your public. If they are satisfied with cheap performance, you will not easily arrive at better. If they know what is good, and require it. you will aspire and burn until you achieve it. But from time to time, in history, men are born a whole age too soon.

Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

It is not enough to conquer; one must learn to seduce.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

A man finds room in the few square inches of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.

But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker of planets and suns, is in him. On one side elemental order, sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore; and on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and decomposes nature.

A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.

I have heard with admiring submission the experience of the lady who declared that the sense of being perfectly well dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which religion is powerless to bestow.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.