Top 100 Quotes About Socrates
#1. In the Immortal word of Socrates...I drank what?
Form the movie Real Genius
Chris Knight
#2. Every bird which flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw. Germination includes the hatching of a meteor and the tap of a swallow's bill breaking the egg, and it leads forward the birth of an earth-worm and the advent of Socrates.
Victor Hugo
#3. I would believe any religion that could prove it had existed since the beginning of the world. But when I see Socrates, Plato, Moses, and Mohammed I do not think there is such a one. All religions owe their origin to man.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#4. Socrates had it wrong; it is not the unexamined but finally the uncommitted life that is not worth living.
William Sloane Coffin
#5. 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
#7. 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
#8. Pythagoras, Locke, Socrates - but pages might be filled up, as vainly as before, with the sad usage of all sorts of sages, who in his life-time, each was deemed a bore! The loftiest minds outrun their tardy ages.
Lord Byron
#9. The creation story is ridiculous garbage. And has given us a completely false picture of our origin as a species and the origins of the cosmos. If you want a good mythical story it would be the life of Socrates.
Christopher Hitchens
#10. 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
#11. More data flows into the building in a single day than mankind as a whole would have generated in the twenty-three centuries between the death of Socrates and the invention of the telephone.
Alain De Botton
#12. The usual picture of Socrates is of an ugly little plebeian who inspired a handsome young nobleman to write long dialogues on large topics.
Richard Rorty
#13. I wonder if Socrates and Plato took a house on Crete during the summer.
Woody Allen
#14. If what philosophers say of the kinship of God and Man be true, what remains for men to do but as Socrates did: - never, when asked one's country, to answer, "I am an Athenian or a Corinthian," but "I am a citizen of the world.
Epictetus
#15. The refractory pupil of Socrates, Aristippus the Cyrene, who believed happiness to be the sum of particular pleasures and golden moments and not, as Epicurus, a prolonged intermediary state between ecstasy and pain.
Cyril Connolly
#16. Like forgiveness, it was not a thing once learned and then comfortably put aside but a matter of constant practice - to accept the notion of one's own mortality, and yet live fully, was a paradox worthy of Socrates.
Diana Gabaldon
#17. The Sophists' paradoxical talk pieces and their public debates were entertainment in 5th century Greece. And in that world, Socrates was an entertainer.
David Antin
#18. It's easier to write about Socrates than about a young woman or a cook.
Anton Chekhov
#19. While most would agree with Socrates that, "the unexamined life is not worth living," a lesser-known quote by Sheldon Kopp might be more important here: "The unlived life is not worth examining.
Meg Jay
#20. According to Plato, Socrates believed all knowledge came from a divine state, but humans had forgotten it. Most lived in a cave of ignorance, but one could become enlightened by climbing out of the darkness and understanding the divide between the spiritual and material planes.
Gwendolyn Womack
#21. Socrates made the same remark to one who complained; he said: Why do you wonder that globe-trotting does not help you, seeing that you always take yourself with you? The reason which set you wandering is ever at your heels.
Seneca.
#22. The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less. - Socrates
Leo Babauta
#23. My friend ... care for your psyche ... know thyself, for once we know ourselves, we may learn how to care for ourselves -Socrates
Socrates
#24. As a rule of thumb I say, if Socrates, Jesus and Tolstoy wouldn't do it, don't.
John Gardner
#25. It is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.
C.S. Lewis
#26. Socrates said he was not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.
Plutarch
#27. Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#28. Tell me, Socrates, have you got a nurse? Why do you ask such a question, I said, when you ought rather to be answering? Because she leaves you to snivel, and never wipes your nose: she has not even taught you to know the shepherd from the sheep. What makes you say that? I replied.
Plato
#29. I read a lot of Socrates in the off-season. Don't print that, or it'll ruin my rep.
Travis Hafner
#30. Socrates ... brought human wisdom back down from heaven, where she was wasting her time, and restored her to man ... It is impossible to go back further and lower. He did a great favor to human nature by showing how much it can do by itself.
Michel De Montaigne
#31. Socrates and Plato are right: whatever man does he always does well, that is, he does that which seems to him good (useful) according to the degree of his intellect, the particular standard of his reasonableness.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#32. 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
#33. Socrates splits himself into two, so that there are two Socrates: the Socrates who knows in advance how the discussion is going to end, and the Socrates who travels the entire dialectical path along with his interlocutor.
Pierre Hadot
#34. I wonder if Socrates would have appreciated the flagrant irony: It's only because his pupils Plato and Xenophon put his disdain for the written word into written words that we have any knowledge of it today
Joshua Foer
#35. So then there was the Greek, Socrates, he was great ... He invented questioning. Before Socrates, no questioning. Everyone sort of went, 'Yeah, I suppose so.
Eddie Izzard
#36. You may not be rich with money, Socrates was not, your life still has tremendous value.
Debasish Mridha
#37. How often when they find a sage
As sweet as Socrates or Plato
They hand him hemlock for his wage
Or bake him like a sweet potato!-Taking the Longer View
Don Marquis
#38. 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
#39. The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don't like their rules, whose would you use?
Dale Carnegie
#40. But Socrates cannot but have been meditating upon something? ... Can he ever remain solitary with himself
and silent to his very soul!
Paul Valery
#41. I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates when he said ... I drank what?
Val Kilmer
#42. When Socrates said he knew nothing he still thought he knew more than anyone else.
Marty Rubin
#43. I started asking the big questions that I had asked in college, that my compatriots the Greek philosophers had asked, like 'what is a good life?' Socrates famously said that 'The unexamined life is not worth living.' I started asking these questions from the starting point of 'what is success?'
Arianna Huffington
#44. Let none presume to measure the irregularities of Michael Angelo or Socrates by village scales.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#45. What do you think Socrates meant when he said, "The unexamined life is not worth living"? Third,
Karen Armstrong
#46. watch out for schools that promise your kids will "experience success." I'm teaching Plato's Dialogues these days, and I noticed that Socrates never let his students experience success. Socrates won the argument every time.
David Kahn
#47. As a boy, he had been moved by those words of the dying Socrates, suggesting that if death were just one long, unbroken, dreamless sleep, then a greater boon could hardly be bestowed upon mankind.
Colin Dexter
#48. It is by losing ourselves in inquiry, creation & craft that we become something. Civilization is a continual gift of spirit: inventions, discoveries, insight, art. We are citizens, as Socrates would have said, & we have it available as our own.
Paul Goodman
#49. Jesus would be another wise man or philosopher like Socrates if it were not for three words. With the declaration of these words the message of the good news of Jesus Christ changed from "fanatical audacity", to the fantastic reality of a reconciled relationship and eternal hope. "HE IS RISEN!
Tom Barton
#50. Socrates: So was I.
Bertha: Are you saying you're as great as him, then?
Socrates: No, no, on the contrary, I'm assuming just the opposite!
Peter Kreeft
#51. I'd like to speak a foreign language well enough to get the jokes. I'd like to talk with Socrates, and watch Michelangelo sculpt David. I'd like to see the world as it was a million years ago and a million years hence.
Robert Fulghum
#52. We all know that the un-examined life is not worth living (socrates). But if all you are doing is examining, you are not living.
Adam Leipzig
#53. Socrates became a trendsetter. Other philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle and Gus, quickly followed suit, dropping their last names too. And, for centuries after that there would be countless imitators including oltaire, Michelangelo, and, much later, Cher.
Demetri Martin
#54. And Quell asked, 'Ah, but what is nature?'
Socrates answered, sparks showering, 'God surprising himself with odd miracles of flesh.
Ray Bradbury
#55. All of a sudden he will catch sight of something wonderfully beautiful in its nature; that, Socrates, is the reason for all his earlier labors
Plato
#56. If you will take my advice you will think little of Socrates, and a great deal more of truth.
Socrates
#57. In ancient Greece, Socrates reportedly didn't fancy a literate society. He felt that people would lose the capacity to think for themselves, simply adopting the perspective of a handy written opinion, and that they would cease to remember what could be written down.
Nick Harkaway
#58. Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.
Emile M. Cioran
#59. Society has always been the free man's greatest enemy. And the free man has been society's greatest friend. How did society treat Jesus, Socrates, Galileo, or Martin Luther King? Yet look what they have left behind.
Laurence Boldt
#60. Behold, he said, the wisdom of Socrates; he refuses to teach himself, and goes about learning of others, to whom he never even says Thank you.
Plato
#61. Before Socrates, philosophers were primarily interested in explaining the world around them and the phenomena of that world - in doing what we would now call science. Although Socrates studied science as a young man, he abandoned it to focus his attention on the human condition.
William B. Irvine
#62. Reality wasn't a syllogism like "Socrates is a man - all men are mortal - hence Socrates is mortal," but more like "Helga is a human being - all telephone booths have been vandalized - hence Helga must die." Or like: "Hitler is a human being - all Jews are animals - hence all Jews must die.
Harry Mulisch
#63. Our connection to the teachings of Socrates, for instance, is through the written word of Plato, because Socrates was vehemently against the written word. Socrates thought that the book would do terrible things to our memories.
Clay A. Johnson
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Socrates taught that
No evil could come
To a good man.
How does that help me?
Evan Rhys
#67. Socrates said that, from above, the Earth looks like one of those twelve-patched leathern balls.
Plato
#68. Socrates ... Whom well inspir'd the oracle pronounc'd Wisest of men.
John Milton
#69. Every human being has, like Socrates, an attendant spirit; and wise are they who obey its signals. If it does not always tell us what to do, it always cautions us what not to do.
Lydia M. Child
#70. For him who fain would teach the world The world holds hate in fee- For Socrates, the hemlock cup; For Christ, Gethsemane.
Don Marquis
#71. The time has come for writers, especially those who are artists, to admit that in this world one cannot make anything out, just as Socrates once admitted it, just as Voltaire admitted it.
Anton Chekhov
#72. In an ideal world, we'd all transform ourselves into experts and make judgments based on extensive knowledge. Given that this will never happen, our next best option is to emulate the wisdom of Socrates: We become wiser when we acknowledge our ignorance.
Joshua Greene
#73. O Socrates, the universe cannot for one instant endure to be only what it is. It is strange to think that that which is All cannot be sufficient unto itself!
Paul Valery
#74. 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
#75. Given that Socrates was effectively assassinated by poison, you might think twice before accepting his invitation to breakfast.
Robert Rowland Smith
#76. 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
#77. Socrates affirmed that only that which the reader already knows can be sparked by a reading, and that the knowledge cannot be acquired through dead letters.
Alberto Manguel
#78. Socrates, who was a perfect model in all great qualities, ... hit on a body and face so ugly and so incongruous with the beauty of his soul, he who was so madly in love with beauty.
Michel De Montaigne
#79. The only analogy I have before me is Socrates. My task is a Socratic task, to revise the definition of what it is to be a Christian. For my part I do not call myself a "Christian" (thus keeping the ideal free), but I am able to make it evident that the others are still less than I.
Soren Kierkegaard
#80. 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
#81. Know thyself,' said Socrates.
Know thyself,' said Sappho, 'and make sure that the Church never finds out.
Jeanette Winterson
#82. To be is to do - Socrates.
To do is to be - Jean-Paul Satre.
Do be do be do -Frank Sinatra.
Kurt Vonnegut
#83. There you have Socrates' wisdom; [b] he himself isn't willing to teach, but he goes around learning from others and isn't even grateful to them.
Plato
#84. Socrates' fame spread all over Greece, and the most respected and educated men from all around came to him, in order to enjoy his friendly company and instruction.
Moses Mendelssohn
#85. I admire the courage and wisdom of Socrates in everything he did, said
and did not say.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#86. What Socrates called the "unexamined life" that is "not worth living" now seems to be the life more people have slipped into than ever before.
Os Guinness
#87. Consider the famous syllogism "All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal." So far, so good. But just because all men are mortal, it does not follow that all mortals are men, and it certainly does not follow that all men are Socrates.
Carol Tavris
#88. One quality in a person doesn't rule out any other quality. They can exist side by side, good and terrible. Socrates said it a lot better.
Thomas Harris
#89. Socrates, after all, could be an intensely annoying man, all the time questioning passers-by until they became exasperated.
Samantha Harvey
#90. 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.
Arianna Huffington
#91. Undoubtedly, on his death bed, at
that moment when, ever since Socrates, it has been proper to pronounce certain elevated words, he told
his wife, as one of my uncles told his, who
had watched beside him for twelve nights, I do not thank you, Therese; you have only done your
duty.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#92. 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
#93. Socrates told us, "the unexamined life is not worth living." I think he's calling for curiosity, more than knowledge. In every human society at all times and at all levels, the curious are at the leading edge.
Roger Ebert
#94. We have no proof that Socrates ever existed. We only know from witnesses to his life that he did. Like Jesus, he never wrote anything down. It doesn't matter to me whether he did or not exist because we have his teachings, his method of thinking, and his extreme intellectual and moral courage.
Christopher Hitchens
#95. Socrates asked the key question:
why should we be moral?
Arundhati Roy
#96. My father was a dreamy fellow - he read Plato and Socrates and watched Phillies games.
Patti Smith
#97. No rational person would intentionally commit an act of evil, for everyone knows that it would bring the wrath of the community upon him. (Socrates)
Karen Essex
#98. Wherever magistrates were appointed from among those who complied with the injunctions of the laws, Socrates considered the government to be an aristocracy.
Xenophon
#99. I hear Socrates saying that the best seasoning for food is hunger; for drink, thirst.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#100. 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 ...
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