Socrates

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

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

No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.

The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.

To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they know quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?

Whenever, therefore, people are deceived and form opinions wide of the truth, it is clear that the error has slid into their minds through the medium of certain resemblances to that truth.

The quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze.

It generally happens that assurance keeps an even pace with ability.

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. The conviction of the rich that the poor are happier is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are.

It is a fine thing to be honest, but it is also very important to be right.

In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not; the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.

The value of a principle is the number of things it will explain; and there is no good theory of disease which does not at once suggest a cure.

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.

Mountains will go into labour, and a silly little mouse will be born.

A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the fine arts.

The public do not know enough to be experts, but know enough to decide between them.

With all the doubt, with every worry, with all the negativity that I mistook for honesty, it kept me blinded. Lying for so long, I fooled myself in believing it to be my reality. And living in that world, it was my reality. Like when the lights come on, or when the curtains are drawn back, the shock of the clarity, meant I had to adjust to the new world I was witnessing. An honest; good with the bad, world, that I can thrive and grow in.

Standing beneath this immense, bejeweled, star-spangled dome, breathing in its life, boundaries fall away, possibilities open up and my wings unfold. And I thought that you were the one who was the angel.

That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.