Socrates

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.

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

Once made equal to man, woman becomes his superior.

One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice; and it is not right to return an injury, or to do evil to any man, however much we have suffered from him.

We are in fact convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself. It seems, to judge from the argument, that the wisdom which we desire and upon which we profess to have set our hearts will be attainable only when we are dead and not in our lifetime.

My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you.

The world will never be long without some good reason to hate the unhappy; their real faults are immediately detected, and if those are not sufficient to sink them into infamy, an additional weight of calumny will be super added.

Every person is a God in embryo. Its only desire is to be born.

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.

Zeal ever follows an appearance of truth, and the assured are too apt to be warm; but it is their weak side in argument; zeal being better shown against sin than persons, or their mistakes.

It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the dear deceit of beauty.

At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man walking into the little booth with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper. No amount of rhetoric or voluminous discussion can possibly diminish the overwhelming importance of that point.

Some of your grief you have cured, and lived to survive; but what torments of pain have you endured that haven’t as yet arrived.

Stay at home in your mind. Don’t recite other people’s opinions. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

Make a good use of the present.

The Artist is he who detects and applies the law from observation of the works of Genius, whether of man or Nature. The Artisan is he who merely applies the rules which others have detected.

The blaze of reputation cannot be blown out, but it often dies in the socket; a very few names may be considered as perpetual lamps that shine unconsumed.

People only see what they are prepared to see.

No matter how hard the past is, we can always begin again.

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.

Their learning is like bread in a besieged town: every man gets a little, but no man gets a full meal.