"Living well and beautifully and justly are all one thing."

"Through your rags I see your vanity."

"I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled [poets] to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean."

"If you don't get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don't want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can't hold on to it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change. Free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is law and no amount of pretending will alter that reality."

"In all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep."

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

"The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance."

"By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher ... and that is a good thing for any man."

"Give me beauty in the inward soul; may the outward and the inward man be at one."

"Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel."

"And a thing is not seen because it is visible, but; conversely, visible because it is seen; nor is a thing led because; it is in the state of being led, or carried because it is in the; state of being carried, but the converse of this. And now I think, Euthyphro, that my meaning will be intelligible; and my; meaning is, that any state of action or passion implies previous; action or passion. It does not become because it is becoming, but it is in a state of becoming because it becomes; neither; does it suffer because it is in a state of suffering, but it is in a; state of suffering because it suffers. Do you not agree?"

"I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good."

"Are you not ashamed of caring so much for the making of money and for fame and prestige, when you neither think nor care about wisdom and truth and the improvement of your soul?"

"The misuse of language induces evil in the soul"

"I know you won't believe me, but the highest form of Human Excellence is to question oneself and others."

"I did not care for the things that most people care about– making money, having a comfortable home, high military or civil rank, and all the other activities, political appointments, secret societies, party organizations, which go on in our city . . . I set myself to do you– each one of you, individually and in private– what I hold to be the greatest possible service. I tried to persuade each one of you to concern himself less with what he has than with what he is, so as to render himself as excellent and as rational as possible."

"By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher ... and that is a good thing for any man."

"The greatest blessing granted to mankind come by way of madness, which is a divine gift."

"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."

"A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true."