Antisthenes Socrates Quotes

#1. The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him. #Quote by Socrates

#2. My dear Socrates ... you know why they are putting you to death? It is because you make people feel stupid for blindly following habits, instincts, and traditions. You may be occasionally right. But you may confuse them about things they've been doing just fine without getting in trouble. You are destroying people's illusions about themselves. You are taking the joy of ignorance out of the things we don't understand. And you have no answer; you have no answer to offer them. #Quote by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#3. Most people, including ourselves, live in a world of relative ignorance. We are even comfortable with that ignorance, because it is all we know. When we first start facing truth, the process may be frightening, and many people run back to their old lives. But if you continue to seek truth, you will eventually be able to handle it better. In fact, you want more! It's true that many people around you now may think you are weird or even a danger to society, but you don't care. Once you've tasted the truth, you won't ever want to go back to being ignorant #Quote by Socrates

#4. Wisdom is knowing when you don't know #Quote by Socrates

#5. Socrates was a philosopher. He went around pointing out errors in the way things were done. They fed him hemlock. #Quote by Gil Amelio

#6. Malice drinketh up the greater part of its own poison. #Quote by Socrates

#7. It's a curious thing that the mental life seems to flourish with its roots in spite, ineffable and fathomless spite. Always has been so! Look at Socrates, in Plato, and his bunch round him! The sheer spite of it all, just sheer joy in pulling somebody else to bits...Protagoras, or whoever it was! And Alcibiades, and all the other little disciple dogs joining in the fray! I must say it makes one prefer Buddha, quietly sitting under a bo-tree, or Jesus, telling his disciples little Sunday stories, peacefully, and without any mental fireworks. No, there's something wrong with the mental life, radically. It's rooted in spite and envy, envy and spite. Ye shall know the tree by its fruit. #Quote by D.H. Lawrence

#8. If it were said that without such bones and sinews and all the rest of them I should not be able to do what I think is right, it would be true; but to say that it is because of them that I do what I am doing, and not through choice of what is best - although my actions are controlled by Mind - would be a very lax and inaccurate form of expression. #Quote by Socrates

#9. The causes which ruined the Republic of Athens illustrate the connection of ethics with politics rather than the vices inherent to democracy. A State which has only 30,000 full citizens in a population of 500,000, and is governed, practically, by about 3000 people at a public meeting, is scarcely democratic. The short triumph of Athenian liberty, and its quick decline, belong to an age which possessed no fixed standard of right and wrong. An unparalleled activity of intellect was shaking the credit of the gods, and the gods were the givers of the law. It was a very short step from the suspicion of Protagoras, that there were no gods, to the assertion of Critias that there is no sanction for laws. If nothing was certain in theology, there was no certainty in ethics and no moral obligation. The will of man, not the will of God, was the rule of life, and every man and body of men had the right to do what they had the means of doing. Tyranny was no wrong, and it was hypocrisy to deny oneself the enjoyment it affords. The doctrine of the Sophists gave no limits to power and no security to freedom; it inspired that cry of the Athenians, that they must not be hindered from doing what they pleased, and the speeches of men like Athenagoras and Euphemus, that the democracy may punish men who have done no wrong, and that nothing that is profitable is amiss. And Socrates perished by the reaction which they provoked. #Quote by John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

#10. [n regard to Jesus believing himself inspired]
This belief carried no more personal imputation than the belief of Socrates that he was under the care and admonition of a guardian demon. And how many of our wisest men still believe in the reality of these inspirations while perfectly sane on all other subjects (Works, Vol. iv, p. 327). #Quote by Thomas Jefferson

#11. Socrates and Jesus, two teachers of virtue and love, were executed because of the unsettling, threatening power of their souls, which was revealed in their personal lives and in their words. #Quote by Thomas Moore

#12. And therefore if the head and the body are to be well, you must begin by curing the soul; that is the first and essential thing. And the care of the soul, my dear youth, has to be effected by the use of certain charms, and these charms are fair words; and by them temperance is implanted in the soul, and where temperance comes and stays, there health is speedily imparted, not only to the head, but to the whole body. #Quote by Socrates

#13. Still I have a favor to ask of them. When my sons are grown up, I would ask you, O my friends, to punish them; and I would have you trouble them, as I have troubled you, if they seem to care about riches, or anything, more than about virtue; or if they pretend to be something when they are really nothing, - then reprove them, as I have reproved you, for not caring about that for which they ought to care, and thinking that they are something when they are really nothing. And if you do this, I and my sons will have received justice at your hands. #Quote by Plato

#14. Socrates had a student named Plato, Plato had a student named Aristotle, and Aristotle had a student named Alexander the Great. #Quote by Old Tom Morris

#15. Socrates worked towards making people question themselves. He like to provoke self-interrogation but wasn't particularly interested in the answers that emerged; he just like to set off the thought process. #Quote by Eric Cantona

#16. If the whole world depends on today's youth, I can't see the world lasting another 100 years. #Quote by Socrates

#17. 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? #Quote by Socrates

#18. Could I climb the highest place in Athens, I would lift up my voice and proclaim, Fellow citizens, why do you burn and scrape every stone to gather wealth, and talk so little care of your children to whom you must one day relinquish all? #Quote by Socrates

#19. Miss Gregory took nearly everything. Her clothes. New girls don't have the privilege of wearing their own clothes. Her books. Socrates, Plato, Shakespeare? Much too stimulating. No wonder you have Ideas. Certainly, you don't wish to become a bluestocking! #Quote by Suzanne Lazear

#20. Tragedy is born of myth, not morality. Prometheus and Icarus are tragic heroes. Yet none of the myths in which they appear has anything to do with moral dilemmas. Nor have the greatest Greek tragedies.

If Euripides is the most tragic of the Greek playwrights, it is not because he deals with moral conflicts but because he understood that reason cannot be the guide of life. #Quote by John N. Gray

#21. I wonder if you've ever considered how strange it is that the educational and character-shaping structures of our culture expose us but a single time in our lives to the ideas of Socrates, Plato, Euclid, Aristotle, Herodotus, Augustine, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Descartes, Rousseau, Newton, Racine, Darwin, Kant, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Freud, Marx, Einstein, and dozens of others of the same rank, but expose us annually, monthly, weekly, and even daily to the ideas of persons like Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, and Buddha. Why is it, do you think, that we need quarterly lectures on charity, while a single lecture on the laws of thermodynamics is presumed to last us a lifetime? Why is the meaning of Christmas judged to be so difficult of comprehension that we must hear a dozen explications of it, not once in a lifetime, but every single year, year after year after year? #Quote by Daniel Quinn

#22. Socrates pioneered conversation as a means of intellectual exploration, of questioning assumptions, ones so deeply ingrained we dont even know we have them. #Quote by Eric Weiner

#23. The cure of many diseases remains unknown to the physicians of Hellos (Greece) because they do not study the whole person. #Quote by Socrates

#24. Socrates defines his life's mission as awakening the Athenians to the supreme importance of attending to their souls. His timeless plea that we connect to ourselves remains the only way for any of us to truly thrive. #Quote by Arianna Huffington

#25. ...[T]hose who care about their souls and do not subordinate them to the body dissociate themselves firmly from these others and refuse to accompany them on their haphazard journey; and, believing that it is wrong to oppose philosophy with her offer of liberation and purification, they turn and follow her wherever she leads... #Quote by Socrates

#26. Then a slice of our neighbours' land will be wanted by us for pasture and tillage,
and they will want a slice of ours, if, like ourselves, they exceed the limit of
necessity, and give themselves up to the unlimited accumulation of wealth?
That, Socrates, will be inevitable.
And so we shall go to war, Glaucon. Shall we not?
Most certainly, he replied. #Quote by Plato

#27. Anyone who can look me in the eye and say they prefer the story of Moses or Jesus or Mohammed to the life of Socrates is intellectually defective. #Quote by Christopher Hitchens

#28. To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils. #Quote by Socrates

#29. In childhood be modest, in youth temperate, in adulthood just, and in old age prudent. #Quote by Socrates

#30. Athenian men, I respect and love you,
but I shall obey the god rather than you ... #Quote by Socrates

#31. In 80% of Socrates' dialogues there was no constructive outcome. He saw his role as simply pointing out what was wrong. #Quote by Edward De Bono

#32. Some have courage in pleasures, and some in pains: some in desires, and some in fears, and some are cowards under the same conditions. #Quote by Socrates

#33. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, [ ... ] and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attilla and a pack of other lovers with queer names [ ... ] I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest ... #Quote by Sylvia Plath

#34. I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates when he said ... I drank what? #Quote by Val Kilmer

#35. The envious person grows lean with the fatness of their neighbor. #Quote by Socrates

#36. Only the knowledge that comes from inside is the real Knowledge #Quote by Socrates

#37. I was astonished at her words, and said: 'Is this really true, O thou wise Diotima?' And she answered with all the authority of an accomplished sophist: 'Of that, Socrates, you may be assured;-think only of the ambition of men, and you will wonder at the senselessness of their ways, unless you consider how they are stirred by the love of an immortality of fame. They are ready to run all risks greater far than they would have run for their children, and to spend money and undergo any sort of toil, and even to die, for the sake of leaving behind them a name which shall be eternal. Do you imagine that Alcestis would have died to save Admetus, or Achilles to avenge Patroclus, or your own Codrus in order to preserve the kingdom for his sons, if they had not imagined that the memory of their virtues, which still survives among us, would be immortal? Nay,' she said, 'I am persuaded that all men do all things, and the better they are the more they do them, in hope of the glorious fame of immortal virtue; for they desire the immortal. #Quote by Plato

#38. Now it is time that we are going, I to die and you to live; but which of us has the happier prospect is unknown to anyone but God #Quote by Socrates

#39. Nobody is qualified to become a statesman who is entirely ignorant of the problem of wheat. #Quote by Socrates

#40. It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.29 #Quote by Michael J. Sandel

#41. But now the giant heads of Plato and Socrates, each with an expression of penetrating wisdom carved on his white features, surveyed the river and the melon beds beyond. #Quote by J.G. Farrell

#42. Let the questions be the curriculum. #Quote by Socrates

#43. Do not be angry with me if I tell you the truth #Quote by Socrates

#44. In Plato's time, dialectics was a debating technique subject to precise rules. A "thesis" was proposed-an interrogative proposition such as: Can virtue be taught? One of the two interlocutors attacked the thesis; the other defended it. The former attacked by interrogating-that is, he asked the defender skillfully chosen questions with the aim of forcing him to admit the contradictory of the thesis he wanted to defend. The interrogator had no thesis, and this was why Socrates was in the habit of playing that role. #Quote by Pierre Hadot

#45. All thinking begins with wondering #Quote by Socrates