Socrates

Do not be angry with me if I tell you the truth

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.

The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.

How many are the things I can do without!

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

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

Almost any man knows how to earn money, but not one in a million knows how to spend it.

Where God does not govern, tyrants will rule.

Love grows. Lust wastes by Enjoyment, and the Reason is, that one springs from an Union of Souls, and the other from an Union of Sense.

In a dark place we find ourselves, and a little more knowledge lights our way.

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you have not slept, or if you have slept, or if you have headache, or sciatica, or leprosy, or thunder-stroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace, and not pollute the morning.

Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character.

Many things difficult in design prove easy in performance.

The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic.

No crime is so great as daring to excel.

It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years?… What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.

Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Youth is like spring, an over-praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.