Socrates

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

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.

My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you’ll be happy; if not, you’ll become a philosopher.

I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live.

Do not do to others what angers you if done to you by others.

I will not say do not weep, for not all tears are evil.

Our most important task is to transform our consciousness so that violence is no longer an option for us in our personal lives, that understanding that a world of peace is possible only if we relate to each other as peaceful beings, one individual at a time.

Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve.

When you know better you do better.

I could have become a soldier if I had waited; I knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating.

He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.

How can what an Englishman believes be hearsay? It is a contradiction in terms.

The years as they pass plunder us of one thing after another.

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.

The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.

Men are born to succeed, not to fail.

A man is related to all nature.

Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.

Every great movement must experience three stages ridicule, discussion, adoption.