"Do you feel no compunction, Socrates, at having followed a line of action which puts you in danger of the death penalty?' I might fairly reply to him, 'You are mistaken, my friend, if you think that a man who is worth anything ought to spend his time weighing up the prospects of life and death. He has only one thing to consider in performing any action--that is, whether he is acting rightly or wrongly, like a good man or a bad one."
"Do you feel no compunction, Socrates, at having followed a line of action which puts you in danger of the death penalty?' I might fairly reply to him, 'You are mistaken, my friend, if you think that a man who is worth anything ought to spend his time weighing up the prospects of life and death. He has only one thing to consider in performing any action--that is, whether he is acting rightly or wrongly, like a good man or a bad one."
"How can you wonder your travels do you no good, when you carry yourself around with you?"
"Now the hour to part has come. I go to die, you go to live. Which of us goes to the better lot is known to no one, except the god."
"Do not do to others what angers you if done to you by others."
"As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent."
"To find yourself, think for yourself."
"Prefer knowledge to wealth, for the one is transitory, the other perpetual."
"As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent."
"Let him who would move the world first move himself."
"Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel."
"Death may be the greatest of all human blessings."
"And so they grow richer and richer, and the more they think of making a fortune the less they think of virtue; for when riches and virtue are placed together in the scales of the balance, the one always rises as the other falls."
"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."
"Be as you wish to seem."
"For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles."
"Nobody is qualified to become a statesman who is entirely ignorant of the problem of wheat."
"The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our separate ways, me to die, and you to live. Which of these two is better? Only God knows."
"Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty."
"One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice; and it is not right to return an injury, or to do evil to any man, however much we have suffered from him."
