Socrates

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.

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

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

If a man is proud of his wealth, he should not be praised until it is known how he employs it.

The hottest love has the coldest end.

An education obtained with money is worse than no education at all.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

An empire is an immense egotism.

He gains everyone’s approval who mixes the pleasant with the useful.

He is no wise man who will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.

The only thing grief as taught me is to know how shallow it is.

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.

One thing life has taught me: if you are interested, you never have to look for new interests. They come to you. When you are genuinely interested in one thing, it will always lead to something else.

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

To the wicked, everything serves as pretext.

Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.

Friendship . . . is an Union of Spirits, a Marriage of Hearts, and the Bond thereof Vertue.

What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.

Work is a necessary evil to be avoided.

Nothing does more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.

A man’s library is a sort of harem.