Socrates

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.

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

In childhood be modest, in youth temperate, in adulthood just, and in old age prudent.

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?

He is richest who is content with the least.

The public do not know enough to be experts, but know enough to decide between them.

Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.

There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.

From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.

Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.

Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.

It’s hard to have it all. And if you’re compromising through one phase of your journey, you’re not giving it all up, you’re compromising for that phase

The sovereign is called a tyrant who knows no laws but his caprice.

A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives, by his dress, by his tastes, by his distastes, by the stories he tells, by his gait, by the notion of his eye, by the look of his house, of his chamber; for nothing on earth is solitary but every thing hath affinities infinite.

Justice delayed is justice denied.

We have only now, only this single eternal moment opening and unfolding before us, day and night.

There are few virtues that the Poles do not possess and there are few errors they have ever avoided.

We all really basically have a lot of magic … it’s only those of us that choose to accept it that really understand it.

Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use rather than total abstinence.

Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.