Quotes from Socrates

I know I'm intelligent because I know that I know nothing.

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

Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty".

To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.

There is one way, then, in which a man can be free from all anxiety about the fate of his soul - if in life he has abandoned bodily pleasures and adornments, as foreign to his purpose and likely to do more harm than good, and has devoted himself to the pleasures of acquiring knowledge, and so by decking his soul not with a borrowed beauty but with its own - with self-control, and goodness, and courage, and liberality, and truth - has fitted himself to await his journey in the next world.

Man's greatest privilege is the discussion of virtue" Socrates in The Apology.

By means of beauty, all beautiful things become beautiful.

wisdom begins in wonder

Life without enquiry is not worth living.

I neither know nor think that I know

Wen das Wort nicht schlägt, den schlägt auch der Stock nicht.

Beloved Pan and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul, and may the outward and the inner man be at one.

a good man cannot be harmed either in life or in death, and that his affairs are not neglected by the gods.

I'm wiser than that person. For it's likely that neither of us knows anything fine and good, but he thinks he knows something he doesn't know, whereas I, since I don't in fact know, don't think that I do either. At any rate, it seems that I'm wiser than he in just this one small way: that what I don't know, I don't think I know.

Get not your friends by bare compliments, but by giving them sensible tokens of your love.

S]ome of the opinions which people entertain should be respected, and others should not.

An honest man is always a child.

I drank what?

It is a base thing for a man to wax old in careless self-neglect before he has lifted up his eyes and seen what manner of man he was made to be, in the full perfection of bodily strength and beauty. But these glories are withheld from him who is guilty of self-neglect, for they are not wont to blaze forth unbidden.

The definition of terms is the beginning of wisdom.

The poets are only the interpreters of the Gods.

Knowledge will make you be free.

Aren't you ashamed to be concerned so much about making all the money you can and advancing your reputation and prestige, while for truth and wisdom and the improvement of your souls you have no thought or car?

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.