Socrates

They are not only idle who do nothing, but they are idle also who might be better employed.

To find yourself, think for yourself.

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

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.

The nearest way to glory is to strive to be what you wish to be thought to be.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

Wisdom is better than silver and gold. I was hopeless, now I’m on hope road.

I find that the Americans have no passions, they have appetites.

If you have good thoughts, they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

Society is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists – talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having.

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage. As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west.

The measure of who we are is what we do with what we have.

A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed receipt.

It’s them as take advantage that get advantage I this world.

Say a word, say a thousand to me on the telephone and I shall choose the wrong one to cling to as though you had said it after long deliberation when only I provoked it from you, I will cling to it from among a thousand, to be provoked and hurl it back with something I mean no more than you meant that, something for you to cling to and retreat clinging to.

Haven’t you learned yet that I put something more than whisky into my speeches.

The pen is the tongue of the mind.

No man undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the meanest; yet everyone thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades, that of government.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.

Hasty resolutions are of the nature of vows, and to be equally avoided