Socrates

The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.

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

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

By all means marry. If you get a good wife you will become happy, and if you get a bad one you will become a philosopher.

The soul is pure when it leaves the body and drags nothing bodily with it, by virtue of having no willing association with the body in life but avoiding it… Practicing philosophy in the right way is a training to die easily.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not, and there is dejection and darkness…

Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables.

Curiosity is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.

Never do wrong when people are looking.

Believing that I was born for the service of mankind, and regarding the care of the commonwealth as a kind of common property which, like the air and the water, belongs to everybody, I set myself to consider in what way mankind might be best served, and what service I was myself best fitted by nature to perform.

But men must know, that in this theatre of man’s life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.

Today, you can decide to walk in freedom. You can choose to walk differently. You can walk as a free person, enjoying every step.

None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm

Upon awakening, let the words Thank You flow from your lips, for this will remind you to begin your day with gratitude and compassion.

There is a sort of subjection which is the peculiar heritage of largeness and of love; and strength is often only another name for willing bondage to irremediable weakness.

Refrain from asking what going to happen tomorrow, and everyday that fortune grants you, count as gain.

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

The test of a man or woman’s breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.

Wine gives a man nothing. It neither gives him knowledge nor wit; it only animates a man, and enables him to bring out what a dread of the company has repressed. It only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost.

The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.