Quotes by Socrates

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

Nobody is qualified to become a statesman who is entirely ignorant of the problems of wheat.

Our prayers should be for blessings in general for God knows best what is good for us.

If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion most people would be content to take their own and depart.

The fewer our wants the nearer we resemble the gods.

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.

Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents gobble their food and tyrannize their teachers.

If a man would move the world he must first move himself.

Our prayers should be for blessings in general, for God knows best what is good for us.

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other mens writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.

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

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

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

The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

He is a man of courage who does not run away, but remains at his post and fights against the enemy.

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

As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent.