Socrates Quotes

"He who is not contended with what he has would not be contended with what he would like to have."

"The true champion of justice, if he intends to survive even for a short time, must necessarily confine himself to private life and leave politics alone."

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

"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."

"From the deepest desires often comes the deadliest hate."

"If you want to be a good saddler, saddle the worst horse; for if you can tame one, you can tame all."

"Sometimes you put walls up not to keep people out, but to see who cares enough to break them down."

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

"Envy is the ulcer of the soul."

"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."

"The misuse of language induces evil in the soul"

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

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

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

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

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

"Children nowadays are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers."

"God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God himself is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us."

"God would seem to indicate to us and not allow us to doubt that these beautiful poems are not human or the work of man, but divine and the work of God; and that the poets are only the interpreters of the Gods..."

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