Socrates

If a man is proud of his wealth, he should not be praised until it is known how he employs it.

No man undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the meanest; yet everyone thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades, that of government.

I am not an Athenian, nor a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

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.

He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.

Slanderers do not hurt me because they do not hit me.

As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.

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

You and I are essentially infinite choice-makers. In every moment of our existence, we are in that field of all possibilities where we have access to an infinity of choices.

Awareness is the greatest agent for change.

Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.

The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.

Most people think that aging is irreversible and we know that there are mechanisms even in the human machinery that allow for the reversal of aging, through correction of diet, through anti-oxidants, through removal of toxins from the body, through exercise, through yoga and breathing techniques, and through meditation.

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

He who is only a traveler learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.

Knowledge exists to be imparted.

Let a man find himself, in distinction from others, on top of two wheels with a chain – at least in a poor country like Russia – and his vanity begins to swell out like his tires. In America it takes an automobile to produce this effect.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.

It is a brave thing to have courage to be an individual; it is also, perhaps, a lonely thing. But it is better than not being an individual, which is to be nobody at all.