Socrates Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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My divine sign indicates the future to me.

Socrates
I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.

Socrates
Having the fewest wants, I am nearest to the gods.

Socrates
The rest of the world lives to eat, while I eat to live.

Socrates
There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.
Variant: The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.

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

Socrates
Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?

Socrates
Crito, we owe a cock to Aesculapius; please pay it and don't forget it.

Socrates
Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.

Socrates
There is no greater evil one can suffer than to hate reasonable discourse.

Socrates
All men's souls are immortal, but the souls of the righteous are immortal and divine.

Socrates
Though flattery blossoms like friendship, yet there is a vast difference in the fruit.

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

Socrates
Anyone who holds a true opinion without understanding is like a blind man on the right road.

Socrates
Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live.

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

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

Socrates
He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.

Socrates
Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions, but those who kindly reprove thy faults.

Socrates
Often when looking at a mass of things for sale, he would say to himself:
How many things I have no need of!
Variant: How many things I can do without!

Socrates
Whenever a number of individuals have a common name, we assume them to have also a corresponding idea or form.

Socrates
Four things belong to a judge: to hear courteously, to answer wisely, to consider soberly, and to decide impartially.

Socrates
When the mind is thinking, is it simply talking to itself, asking questions and answering them, and saying yes or no.

Socrates
But, my dearest Agathon, it is truth which you cannot contradict; you can without any difficulty contradict Socrates.

Socrates
It is perfectly certain that the soul is immortal and imperishable, and our souls will actually exist in another world.

Socrates
The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways — I to die and you to live. Which is the better, only God knows.

Socrates
I believe that we cannot live better than in seeking to become better, nor more agreeably than having a clear conscience.

Socrates
It is never right to do wrong or to requite wrong with wrong, or when we suffer evil to defend ourselves by doing evil in return.

Socrates
To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know.

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

Socrates