Socrates
Whoever would have his body supple, easy and healthful should learn to dance.Collection: Dance
To know, is to know that you know nothing.Collection: Knowing Nothing
You think that upon the score of fore-knowledge and divining I am infinitely inferior to the swans. When they perceive approaching death they sing more merrily than before, because of the joy they have in going to the God they serve.Collection: Knowledge
...one thing I am ready to fight for as long as I can, in word and act: that is, that we shall be better, braver and more active men if we believe it right to look for what we don't know than if we believe there is no point in looking because what we don't know we can never discover.Collection: Believe
I know that I know nothing.Collection: Knows
Wisdom is knowing when you don't knowCollection: Knowing
If you will take my advice you will think little of Socrates, and a great deal more of truth.Collection: Thinking
To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know.Collection: Wise
Nobody knows anything, but I, knowing nothing, am the smartest man in the world.Collection: Men
To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.Collection: Shadow
The fewer our wants the more we resemble the Gods.Collection: Inspirational
The examined life is the only life worth living.Collection: Motivational
The warm love has the coldest end.Collection: Sad Relationship
Philebus was saying that enjoyment and pleasure and delight, and the class of feelings akin to them, are a good to every living being, whereas I contend, that not these, but wisdom and intelligence and memory, and their kindred, right opinion and true reasoning, are better and more desirable than pleasureCollection: Memories
Our purpose in founding the city was not to make any one class in it surpassingly happy, but to make the city as a whole as happyas possible.Collection: Class
The comic and the tragic lie inseparably close, like light and shadow.Collection: Happiness
Some have courage in pleasures, and some in pains: some in desires, and some in fears, and some are cowards under the same conditions.Collection: Pain
A painter will paint a cobbler, carpenter, or any other artist, though he knows nothing of their arts; and, if he is a good artist, he may deceive children or simple persons, when he shows them his picture of a carpenter from a distance, and they will fancy that they are looking at a real carpenter.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Wisdom
Virtue does not come from wealth, but wealth, and every other good thing which men have comes from virtue.Collection: Men
Such as thy words are, such will thy affections be esteemed; and such will thy deeds be as thy affections and such thy life as thy deeds.Collection: Deeds
If thou continuous to take delight in idle argumentation thou mayest be qualified to combat with the sophists, but will never know how to live with men.Collection: Men
In every sort of danger there are various ways of winning through, if one is ready to do and say anything whatever.Collection: Winning
Wars and revolutions and battles are due simply and solely to the body and its desires.Collection: War
Every pleasure or pain has a sort of rivet with which it fastens the soul to the body and pins it down and makes it corporeal, accepting as true whatever the body certifies.Collection: Pain
The Delphic Oracle said I was the wisest of all the Greeks. It is because that I alone, of all the Greeks, know that I know nothing.Collection: Wisdom
If we pursue our habit of eating animals, and if our neighbour follows a similar path, will we need to go to war against our neighbour to secure greater pasturage, because ours will not be enough to sustain us, and our neighbour will have a similar need to wage war on us for the same reason.Collection: War
Wealth does not bring about excellence (aka areté), but excellence (aka areté) brings about wealth and all other public and private blessings for men.Collection: Blessing
I know nothing but the certainty of my own ignorance.Collection: Ignorance
There is a doctrine whispered in secret that a man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door and run away; this is a great mystery which I do not quite understand.Collection: Running
And the same things look bent and straight when seen in water and out of it, and also both concave and convex, due to the sight's being mislead by the colors, and every sort of confusion of this kind is plainly in our soul. And, then, it is because they take advantage of this affection in our nature that shadow painting, and puppeteering, and many other tricks of the kind fall nothing short of wizardry.Collection: Fall
I soon realized that poets do not compose their poems with knowledge, but by some inborn talent and by inspiration, like seers and prophets who also say many fine things without any understanding of what they say.Collection: Inspiration
He who has lived as a true philosopher has reason to be of good cheer when he is about to die, and that after death he may hope to receive the greatest good in the other world.Collection: Cheer
The nearest way to glory a shortcut, as it were is to strive to be what you wish to be thought to be.Collection: Wish
I am that gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you.Collection: Long
You too must be of good hope as regards death, gentlemen of the jury, and keep this one truth in mind, that a good man cannot be harmed either in life or in death, and that his affairs are not neglected by the gods. What has happened to me now has not happened of itself, but it is clear to me that it was better for me to die now and to escape from trouble. That is why my divine sign did not oppose me at any point. So I am certainly not angry with those who convicted me, or with my accusers. Of course that was not their purpose when they accused and convicted me, but they thought they were hurting me, and for this they deserve blame.Collection: Life
As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repentCollection: Marriage
If measure and symmetry are absent from any composition in any degree, ruin awaits both the ingredients and the composition... Measure and symmetry are beauty and virtue the world over.Collection: Degrees
Nothing is to be preferred before justice.Collection: Philosophical
In my investigation in the service of the god I found that those who had the highest reputation were nearly the most deficient, while those who were thought to be inferior were more knowledgeable.Collection: Apology
There are a great many of these accusers, and they have been accusing me now for a great many years, and what is more, they approached you at the most impressionable age, when some of you were children or adolescents; and literally won their case by default, because there was no one to defend me.Collection: Children
It seems that God took away the minds of poets that they might better express His.Collection: Mind
I only know how little I knowCollection: Littles
Virtue is the nursing-mother of all human pleasures, who, in rendering them just, renders them also pure and permanent; in moderating them, keeps them in breath and appetite; in interdicting those which she herself refuses, whets our desires to those that she allows; and, like a kind and liberal mother, abundantly allows all that nature requires, even to satiety, if not to lassitude.Collection: Mother
In order that the mind should see light instead of darkness, so the entire soul must be turned away from this changing world, until its eye can learn to contemplate reality and that supreme splendor which we have called the good. Hence there may well be an art whose aim would be to effect this very thing.Collection: Art
What a lot of things there are a man can do without.Collection: Men
Beloved Pan and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and the inward man be one.Collection: Men
You are wrong, sir, if you think that a man who is any good at all should take into account the risk of life or death; he should look to this only in his actions, whether what he does is right or wrong, whether he is acting like a good or a bad man.Collection: Apology
Do you suppose that I should have lived as long as I have if I had moved in the sphere of public life, and conducting myself in that sphere like an honorable man, had always upheld the cause of right, and conscientiously set this end above all other things? Not by a very long way, gentlemen; neither would any other man.Collection: Men