Top 60 Philosophy Socrates Quotes
#1. For philosophy, Socrates, if pursued in moderation and at the proper age, is an elegant accomplishment, but too much philosophy is the ruin of human life.
Plato
#2. Don't confuse scepticism as an attitude, or a method, with scepticism as a philosophy. Socrates was sceptical in temperament, and his method was to question everything. But he believed in absolute truth; he was no sceptic.
Peter Kreeft
#3. Socrates may have thought himself to be the wisest in Athens, but King Solomon was the wisest in the world. With all his philosophy Socrates died a poor man, and with all his wisdom King Solomon died a rich man.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#4. Are you not ashamed of caring so much for the making of money and for fame and prestige, when you neither think nor care about wisdom and truth and the improvement of your soul?
Socrates
#5. It is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.
C.S. Lewis
#6. Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.
Socrates
#7. Socrates was the first to call philosophy down from the heavens and to place it in cities, and even to introduce it into homes and compel it to inquire about life and standards and goods and evils.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#8. Socrates ... is the first philosopher of life [Lebensphilosoph], ... Thinking serves life, while among all previous philosophers life had served thought and knowledge ... Thus Socratic philosophy is absolutely practical: it is hostile to all knowledge unconnected to ethical implications.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#9. My world view is somewhat unique. I have learned from many great philosophers including Plato, Socrates, Buddha, Jesus, Darwin, Tagore, Emerson, and many more.
Debasish Mridha
#10. The artist must be a philosopher. Socrates the skilled sculptor, Jean-Jacques [Rousseau] the good musician, and the immortal Poussin, tracing on the canvas the sublime lessons of philosophy, are so many proofs that an artistic genius should have no other guide except the torch of reason.
Jacques-Louis David
#12. Let none presume to measure the irregularities of Michael Angelo or Socrates by village scales.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#13. Besides, it is a shame to let yourself grow old through neglect before seeing how you can develop the maximum beauty and strength of body; and you can have this experience if your are negligent, because these things don't normally happen by themselves.
Socrates
#14. There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.
Michel De Montaigne
#15. You may not be rich with money, Socrates was not, your life still has tremendous value.
Debasish Mridha
#16. Plato, the first true pope of philosophy (sorry, Socrates), argued for a World of Forms above the reality-a transcendent plane of perfect essences, pure and lovely, where nothing ever gets muddy (including the essence of mud.)
N.D. Wilson
#17. There is also a tradition about Socrates. He liked walking, it is recorded, until a late hour of the evening, and when someone asked him why he did this he said he was trying to work up an appetite for his dinner.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#18. Wonder [said Socrates] is very much the affection of a philosopher; for there is no other beginning of philosophy than this.
Plato
#19. 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.
Socrates
#20. I hate those Socratic dialogues where everything gets drawn out at the pace of an excessively logical snail.
Jo Walton
#21. I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think
Socrates
#22. Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling: what a frightful waste of time! What's the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#23. Socrates condemned art because he preferred philosophy and only after much internal struggle did Plato accept this judgment.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#24. He could very likely have appealed for leniency. At least he could have saved his life by agreeing to leave Athens. But had he done this he would not have been Socrates. He valued his conscience
and the truth
higher than life.
Jostein Gaarder
#25. I believe it was Gorgias who was first to posit the impossibility of ever prooving anything - in which case, it might as well have been me to first propose this idea, just now.
Dan Garfat-Pratt
#26. Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.
Socrates
#27. The story goes that one day Socrates stood gazing at a stall that sold all
kinds of wares. Finally he said, What a lot of things I don't need!
Jostein Gaarder
#28. Socrates asked the key question:
why should we be moral?
Arundhati Roy
#29. Was the excellence of Socrates or of Shakespeare normal? Was it not rather abnormal, extraordinary? It is, I think, obvious in the first place, that not all that is good is normal; that, on the contrary, the abnormal is often better than the normal...
G.E. Moore
#30. Socrates once said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." I would expand on his thought by suggesting, "The unexamined society is not worth living in.
Eileen Workman
#31. I bomb atomically, Socrates' philosophies and hypotheses
Can't define how I be dropping these mockeries.
Lyrically perform armed robbery,
Flee with the lottery, possibly they spotted me ...
Inspectah Deck
#32. The Republic isn't as much fun as The Symposium. It's all long speeches, and nobody bursting in drunk to woo Socrates in the middle.
Jo Walton
#33. Socrates said that an unexamined life is not worth living. But you know, an over-examined life can be a real crap festival, too.
Alex Bosworth
#34. All I know is that I do not know anything
Socrates
#35. Buddha, Confucius, or Socrates can bring us good teaching, moral excellence, and religious philosophy. For this they may be commended as rendering help and aid to humanity. But Jesus Christ is different: He brings us Himself as our Life.
Chip Brogden
#36. Mankind is made of two kinds of people: wise people who know they're fools, and fools who think they are wise.
Socrates
#37. This sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin.
Socrates
#38. It is extraordinary to think about. We still speak of Socratic or Platonic philosophy, but actually being Plato or Socrates is quite another matter.
Jostein Gaarder
#39. Out of them all, Socrates is the hardest to deconstruct ... Indeed, he may just be indeconstructible.
Martin Cohen
#40. Socrates should have written comics.
Mark Waid
#41. A philosopher knows that in reality he knows very little. That is why he constantly strives to achieve true insight. Socrates was one of these rare people. He knew that he knew nothing about life and about the world. And now comes the important part: it troubled him that he knew so little.
Jostein Gaarder
#42. Socrates (770-399 B.C.[E.]) is possibly the most enigmatic figure in the entire history of philosophy. He never wrote a single line. Yet he is one of the philosophers who has had the greatest influence on European thought, not least because of the dramatic manner of his death.
Jostein Gaarder
#43. My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy; if not, you'll become a philosopher.
Socrates
#44. Socrates had no system to teach. Throughout, his philosophy was a spiritual exercise, an invitation to a new way of life, active reflection, and living consciousness.
Pierre Hadot
#45. As a Roman philosopher, Cicero, said of him a few hundred years later, Socrates 'called philosophy down from the sky and established her in the towns and introduced her into homes and forced her to investigate life, ethics, good and evil.
Jostein Gaarder
#47. Intelligent individuals learn from every thing and every one; average people, from their experiences. The stupid already have all the answers.
Socrates
#48. Athenian men, I respect and love you,
but I shall obey the god rather than you ...
Socrates
#49. White folks was in the caves while we [blacks] was building empires ... We built pyramids before Donald Trump ever knew what architecture was ... we taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.
Al Sharpton
#50. If Socrates was alive today he would say : I know that I know everything. That's what contemporary philosophers do.
Ljupka Cvetanova
#51. I only know that I know nothing
Socrates
#52. What is democracy? It is what it says, the rule of the people. It is as good as the people are, or as bad.
Mary Renault
#53. The world's a puzzle; no need to make sense out of it. - Socrates
Dan Millman
#54. The soul is pure when it leaves the body and drags nothing bodily with it, by virtue of having no willing association with the body in life but avoiding it ... Practicing philosophy in the right way is a training to die easily.
Socrates
#55. Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.
Alain De Botton
#56. Get married, in any case. If you happen to get a good mate, you will be happy; if a bad one, you will become philosophical, which is a fine thing in itself.
Socrates
#57. We need both Socrates and Aristotle in the search for knowledge, but in education today there is too much Aristotle and too little Socrates.
Gregory J.E. Rawlins
#58. Socrates insisted that there's a strong connection between your philosophy (how you interpret the world, what you think is important in life) and your mental and physical health. Different beliefs lead to different emotional states...
Jules Evans
#59. PLATONIC, adj. Pertaining to the philosophy of Socrates. Platonic Love is a fool's name for the affection between a disability and a frost.
Ambrose Bierce
#60. For I am certain, O men of Athens, that if I had engaged in politics, I should have perished long ago and done no good either to you or to myself.
Plato
