All Quotes

"Ὦ Κρίτων [...] τῷ Ἀσκληπιῷ ὀφείλομεν ἀλεκτρυόνα. ἀλλὰ ἀπόδοτε καὶ μὴ ἀμελήσητε."

"The being of all virtues, and chiefly of temperance, depends on the practice of them."

"You will know that the divine is so great and of such a nature that it sees and hears everything at once, is present everywhere, and is concerned with everything."

"Order and discipline are the most important things in an army, and without them it is impossible to have any other service of the troops than of a confused heap of stones, bricks, timber, and tiles; but when everything is in its due place, as in a building, when the foundations and the covering are made of materials that will not grow rotten, and which no wet can damage, such as are stones and tiles, and when the bricks and timber are employed in their due places in the body of the edifice, they altogether make a house, which we value among our most considerable enjoyments."

"It is a disgrace to grow old through sheer carelessness before seeing what manner of man you may become by developing your bodily strength and beauty to their highest limit. But you cannot see that, if you are careless; for it will not come of its own accord."

"If I am to live longer, perhaps I must live out my old age, seeing and hearing less, understanding worse, coming to learn with more difficulty and to be more forgetful, and growing worse than those to whom I was once superior. Indeed, life would be unliveable, even if I did not notice the change. And if I see the change, how could life not be even more wretched and unpleasant?"

"ἆρα, ἔφην, ὦ Ἰσχόμαχε, ἡ ἐρώτησις διδασκαλία ἐστίν; ἄρτι γὰρ δή, ἔφην ἐγώ, καταμανθάνω ᾗ με ἐπηρώτησας ἕκαστα: ἄγων γάρ με δι᾽ ὧν ἐγὼ ἐπίσταμαι, ὅμοια τούτοις ἐπιδεικνὺς ἃ οὐκ ἐνόμιζον ἐπίστασθαι ἀναπείθεις, οἶμαι, ὡς καὶ ταῦτα ἐπίσταμαι."

"It is the example of the rider who wishes to become an expert horseman: "None of your soft-mouthed, docile animals for me," he says; "the horse for me to own must show some spirit" in the belief, no doubt, if he can manage such an animal, it will be easy enough to deal with every other horse besides. And that is just my case. I wish to deal with human beings, to associate with man in general; hence my choice of wife. I know full well, if I can tolerate her spirit, I can with ease attach myself to every human being else."

"I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world."

"He [Socrates] would say that the rest of the world lived to eat, while he himself ate to live."

"Contentment is natural wealth; luxury, artificial poverty."

"If we are to use women for the same things as the men, we must also teach them the same things."

"The state will only ever be a half of itself."

"Socrates: Shall we set down astronomy among the objects of study? Glaucon: I think so, to know something about the seasons, the months and the years is of use for military purposes, as well as for agriculture and for navigation. Socrates: It amuses me to see how afraid you are, lest the common herd of people should accuse you of recommending useless studies."

"Know thyself."

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."

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

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

"The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be."

"Prefer knowledge to wealth, for the one is transitory, and the other perpetual."

"The really important thing is not to live, but to live well. And to live well meant, along with more enjoyable things in life, to live according to your principles."

"True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us."

"When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser."

"By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher."

"Exercise till the mind feels delight in reposing from the fatigue."

"As for me, all I know is that I know nothing."

"If one examines the reasons for the persecution of the best minds of different nations, and compares the reasons for the persecution and banishment of Pythagoras, Anaxagoras, Socrates, Plato, and others, one can observe that in each case the accusations and reasons for banishment were almost identical and unfounded. But in the following centuries full exoneration came, as if there had never been any defamation. It would be correct to conclude that such workers were too exalted for the consciousness of their contemporaries, and the sword of the executioner was ever ready to cut off a head held high. A book should be written about the causes of the persecution of great individuals. By comparing the causes is it possible to trace the evil will. I advise you to write such a book. Let someone do it! Through research it will be possible to discover the inner similarities between the persecutions of Confucius and Seneca."

"Socrates makes me admit to myself that, even though I myself am deficient in so many regards, I continue to take no care of myself, but occupy myself with the business of the Athenians."

"This man here is so bizarre, his ways so unusual, that, search as you might, you'll never find anyone else, alive or dead, who's even remotely like him. The best you do is not to compare him to anything human, but liken him, as I do, to Silenus and the satyrs, and the same goes for his ideas and arguments."

"He who has studied Pythagoras and his speculations on the Monad, which, after having emanated the Duad retires into silence and darkness, and thus creates the Triad can realize whence came the philosophy of the great Samian Sage, and after him that of Socrates and Plato."

"Socrates had never been initiated, and hence divulged nothing which had ever been imparted to him."

"Socrates is well known to have sent away several of his disciples to study manticism. The study of magic, or wisdom, included every branch of science, the metaphysical as well as the physical, psychology and physiology in their common and occult phases, and the study of alchemy was universal, for it was both a physical and a spiritual science. Therefore why doubt or wonder that the ancients, who studied nature under its double aspect, achieved discoveries which to our modern physicists, who study but its dead letter, are a closed book?"

"Crantor, another philosopher associated with the earliest days of Plato's Academy, conceived the human soul as formed out of the primary substance of all things, the Monad or One, and the Duad or the Two. Plutarch speaks at length of this philosopher, who like his master believed in souls being distributed in earthly bodies as an exile and punishment. Herakleides, though some critics do not believe him to have strictly adhered to Plato's primal philosophy, taught the same ethics. Zeller presents him to us imparting, like Hicetas and Ecphantus, the Pythagorean doctrine of the diurnal rotation of the earth and the immobility of the fixed stars, but adds that he was ignorant of the annual revolution of the earth around the sun, and of the heliocentric system. But we have good evidence that the latter system was taught in the Mysteries, and that Socrates died for atheism, i.e., for divulging this sacred knowledge."

"Socrates gave a lot of advice, and he was given Hemlock to drink."

"And so, from this day forth, we want all the more to let our thoughts revolve around and hover over Socrates and Christ at all times, openly taking pride that they are more alive for us than all those living today and that we listen to and love them as we do none of the living."

"Socrates and Christ speak to us everlastingly of mankind. ... It belongs to the great, to the greatest men to say how things are with mankind, how they stand in its innerness and which way it is going; it belongs to Socrates and Christ. These absolutely extraordinary, eternally alive people penetrate to the groundless depth of human nature and understand the speech of ordinary people, of those who are scarcely alive from one day to the next."

"Socrates autem primus philosophiam devocavit e caelo et in urbibus conlocavit et in domus etiam introduxit et coegit de vita et moribus rebusque bonis et malis quaerere."

"Socrates was a totally new kind of Greek philosopher. He denied that he had discovered some new wisdom, indeed that he possessed any wisdom at all, and he refused to hand anything down to anyone as his personal ‘truth’, his claim to fame. All that he knew, humbly, was how to reason and reflect, how to improve himself and (if they would follow him in behaving the same way) help others to improve themselves, by doing his best to make his own moral, practical opinions, and his life itself, rest on appropriately tested and examined reasons—not on social authority or the say-so of esteemed poets (or philosophers) or custom or any other kind of intellectual laziness. At the same time, he made this self-improvement and the search for truth in which it consisted a common, joint effort, undertaken in discussion together with similarly committed other persons—even if it sometimes took on a rather combative aspect. The truth, if achieved, would be a truth attained by and for all who would take the trouble to think through on their own the steps leading to it: it could never be a personal'revelation' for which any individual could claim special credit."

"throughout the history of the world, there've been political prisoners. We could even talk about Socrates, who was also a political prisoner."

"If Socrates died, then either he died when we was living, or when he was dead. But he couldn't have died when he was living, for he was not dead when he was living. But he couldn't have died when he was dead, for when he was dead he had already died. Therefore, Socrates never died."

"What then is the chastisement of those who accept it not? To be as they are. Is any discontented with being alone? let him be in solitude. Is any discontented with his parents? let him be a bad son, and lament. Is any discontented with his children? let him be a bad father.—"Throw him into prison!"—What prison?—Where he is already: for he is there against his will; and wherever a man is against his will, that to him is a prison. Thus Socrates was not in prison since he was there with his own consent."

"It was the first and most striking characteristic of Socrates never to become heated in discourse, never to utter an injurious or insulting word—on the contrary, he persistently bore insult from others and thus put an end to the fray."

"Seemeth it nothing to you, never to accuse, never to blame either God or Man? to wear ever the same countenance in going forth as in coming in? This was the secret of Socrates: yet he never said that he knew or taught anything... Who amongst you makes this his aim? Were it indeed so, you would gladly endure sickness, hunger, aye, death itself."

"Socrates it was who truly built piecemeal that theorical man. He did it by his doctrine which was singularly deep in the sense that it went straight out to the end of the initial thought, but his radically false doctrine was that morality is in proportion to knowledge, that the man that does not do good is a man that does not know the good and that the man that knows the good does assuredly do it. Here it is precisely, the theorical man introduced as king of the world! Now nothing is more false than this notion. The opposite is more likely to be true. The man that knows the good does not do it, because he is satisfied with knowing it and that is enough for his conceit and because, knowing the good and knowing that he knows it, he fancies that he is doing it and that he has accomplished and fulfilled his duty. The good is instinctive and passionate; the good is in the action and the action is, we must admit, rarely inspired by the idea and by knowledge. It is frequently, one must admit, the effect of an instinctive and unconscious movement."

"Neither one nor the other doth follow, for that both the assertions may be true. The Oracle adjudged Socrates the wi­sest of all men, whose knowledg is limited; Socrates acknowledgeth that he knew nothing in relation to absolute wisdome, which is infinite; and because of infinite, much is the same part as is little, and as is nothing (for to arrive... to the infinite number, it is all one to accumulate thousands, tens, or ciphers,) therefore Socrates well perceived his wisdom to be nothing, in comparison of the infinite knowledg which he wanted. But yet, because there is some knowledg found amongst men, and this not equally shared to all, Socrates might have a greater share thereof than others, and therefore verified the answer of the Oracle."

"Compared with Socrates and Bruno, with the great martyrs of Russia, with the Chicago Anarchists, Francisco Ferrer, and unnumbered others, Christ cuts a poor figure indeed."

"writing should be dangerous: as dangerous as Socrates. There should be no refuge for the writer either in the Ivory Tower or the Social Church."

"Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle. That principle is of great antiquity; it is as old as Socrates; as old as the writer who said, 'Try all things, hold fast by that which is good'; it is the foundation of the Reformation, which simply illustrated the axiom that every man should be able to give a reason for the faith that is in him, it is the great principle of Descartes; it is the fundamental axiom of modern science."

"I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates."

"People think the world needs a republic, and they think it needs a new social order, and a new religion, but it never occurs to anyone that what the world really needs, confused as it is by much learning, is a new Socrates."