Socrates

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

To find yourself, think for yourself.

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

Call no man unhappy until he is married.

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

To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they know quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?

Necessity is the mother of taking chances.

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.

Always seeking acceptance from others, searching for belonging. Striving for individuality, yet wanting to fit in. Never understanding that acceptance for one’s own individuality make all of that redundant.

Well I am certainly wiser than this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of; but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know.

Whatever advice you give, be short.

Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation.

One thing life has taught me: if you are interested, you never have to look for new interests. They come to you. When you are genuinely interested in one thing, it will always lead to something else.

A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us.

No one ever became great by imitation.

Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

I look on that man as happy, who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a reply.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, imaginatively; unless you can choose a challenge instead of competence.

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

We are a puny and fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and following are our diseases.