Socrates

True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.

The envious person grows lean with the fatness of their neighbor.

By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll be happy. If you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher… and that is a good thing for any man.

Remember, no human condition is ever permanent. Then you will not be overjoyed in good fortune nor too scornful in misfortune.

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

To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.

He is armed without who is innocent within, be this thy screen, and this thy wall of brass.

If you are good, life is good.

Beauty without expression is boring.

Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short, in all the management of human affairs.

When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.

A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning’s greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications. Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.

Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom.

Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruits, but dollars.

Sincerity is the luxury allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank. Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.

Though wisdom cannot be gotten for gold, still less can be gotten without it.