16 Socrates Quotes on Socrates

Socrates quotes on socrates

8. The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being. (ho de anexetastos bios ou biotos anthropoi)

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

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

30. Be of good cheer about death and know this as a truth - that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.

31. Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm and constant.

32. Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

33. Beauty is the bait which with delight allures man to enlarge his kind.

34. Beware the barrenness of a busy life.

35. By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.

36. Call no man unhappy until he is married.

37. Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.

88. 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.

96. I drank what?

98. If anyone thinks that Socrates is proven to have lied about his daimon because the jury condemned him to death when he stated that a divinity revealed to him what he should and should not do, then let him take note of two things: first, that Socrates was so far advanced in age that he would have died soon, if not then; and second, that he escaped the most bitter part of life, when all men's mental powers diminish.

99. 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. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.

100. 'I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates.'

     Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.