Socrates

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Fame is the perfume of heroic deeds.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

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.

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.

I was afraid that by observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my other senses I might blind my soul altogether.

Man – a creature made at the end of the week’s work when God was tired.

The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man, you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind, I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that.

At 70 years old, if I could give my younger self one piece of advice, It would be to use the phrase ‘f**k off’ much more frequently.

The State must follow, and not lead, the character and progress of the citizen.

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

One night awaits all, and death’s path must be trodden once and for all.

You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it, man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.

I shall not wholly die, and a great part of me will escape the grave.

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

Dear to us are those who love us… but dearer are those who reject us as unworthy, for they add another life; they build a heaven before us whereof we had not dreamed, and thereby supply to us new powers out of the recesses of the spirit, and urge us to new and unattempted performances.

Civilisation will not last, freedom will not survive, peace will not be kept, unless a very large majority of mankind unite together to defend them and show themselves possessed of a constabulary power before which barbaric and atavistic forces will stand in awe.

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure.