Socrates

Let him that would move the world, first move himself.

How many are the things I can do without!

He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature.

The comic and the tragic lie inseparably close, like light and shadow.

I am not an Athenian, nor a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Repose and cheerfulness are the badge of the gentleman – repose in energy.

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west. We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.

Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.

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

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

Friendships begin with liking or gratitude roots that can be pulled up.

The advantage of doing one’s praising to oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.

And when a woman’s will is as strong as the man’s who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

What we become depends on what our fathers teach us.

Watch what you say, and whatever you say, practice it.

When the righteous man truth away from his righteousness that he hath committed and doeth that which is neither quite lawful nor quite right, he will generally be found to have gained in amiability what he has lost in holiness.

Passion is the mob of the man, that commits a riot upon his reason.

We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.

Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities.