Socrates Quotes
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251. “If you want to be a good saddler, saddle the worst horse; for if you can tame one, you can tame all.”

— Socrates

252. “I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live.”

— Socrates

253. “Why do you wonder that globetrotting does not help you, seeing that you always take yourself with you? The reason that set you wandering is ever at your heels.”

— Socrates

254. “There’s no good answer to a question you didn’t hear.”

— Socrates

255. “To need nothing is divine, and the less a man needs the nearer does he approach to divinity.”

— Socrates

256. “The warm love has the coldest end.”

— Socrates

257. “I know what I do not know.”

— Socrates

258. “A free soul ought not to pursue any study slavishly, for nothing that is learned under compulsion stays with the mind.”

— Socrates

259. “The noblest worship is to make yourself as good and as just as you can.”

— Socrates

260. “The reason why we have to acquire wealth is the body, because we are slaves in its service.”

— Socrates

261. “In every sort of danger there are various ways of winning through, if one is ready to do and say anything whatever.”

— Socrates

262. “The individual leads in order that those who are led can develop their potential as human beings and thereby prosper.”

— Socrates

263. “The partisan when he is engaged in a dispute, cares nothing about the rights of the question, but is anxious only to convince his hearers of his own assertions.”

— Socrates

264. “The uninitiated are those who believe in nothing except what they can grasp in their hands, and who deny the existence of all that is invisible.”

— Socrates

265. “The beginning is the most important part, especially when dealing with anything young and tender.”

— Socrates

266. “Before the birth of Love, many fearful things took place through the empire of necessity; but when this god was born, all things rose to men.”

— Socrates

267. “Flattery is like a painted armor; only for show.”

— Socrates

268. “The bad one is that way because of the ignorance, therefore he can be healed with wisdom.”

— Socrates

269. “When you propose ridiculous things to believe, too many men will choose to believe nothing at all.”

— Socrates

270. “If I can assign names as well as pictures to objects, the right assignment of them we may call truth, and the wrong assignment of them falsehood.”

— Socrates

271. “Flattery is like friendship in show, but not in fruit.”

— Socrates

272. “Through your rags I see your vanity.”

— Socrates

273. “I was afraid that by observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my other senses I might blind my soul altogether.”

— Socrates

274. “The envious person grows lean with the fatness of their neighbor.”

— Socrates

275. “Nobody is qualified to become a statesman who is entirely ignorant of the problem of wheat.”

— Socrates

276. “I call that man idle who might be better employed.”

— Socrates

277. “I am confident that there truly is such a thing as living again, that the living spring from the dead, and that the souls of the dead are in existence.”

— Socrates

278. “It is not the purpose of a juryman’s office to give justice as a favor to whoever seems good to him, but to judge according to law, and this he has sworn to do.”

— Socrates

279. “Slanderers do not hurt me because they do not hit me.”

— Socrates

280. “A system of morality that is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception that has nothing sound in it and nothing true.”

— Socrates

281. “If you can do only a little. Do what you can. What you cannot enforce, do not command.”

— Socrates

282. “The highest realms of thought are impossible to reach without first attaining an understanding of compassion.”

— Socrates

283. “She soars on her own wings.”

— Socrates

284. “Do not do to others what angers you if done to you by others.”

— Socrates

285. “I am that gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you.”

— Socrates

286. “Every pleasure or pain has a sort of rivet with which it fastens the soul to the body and pins it down and makes it corporeal, accepting as true whatever the body certifies.”

— Socrates

287. “The friend must be like money, that before you need it, the value is known.”

— Socrates

288. “The greatest flood has the soonest ebb; the sorest tempest the most sudden calm; the hottest love the coldest end; and from the deepest desire oftentimes ensues the deadliest hate.”

— Socrates

289. “For this fear of death is indeed the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being the appearance of knowing the unknown; since no one knows whether death, which they in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.”

— Socrates

290. “If a man is proud of his wealth, he should not be praised until it is known how he employs it.”

— Socrates

291. “It is possible that a man could live twice as long if he didn’t spend the first half of his life acquiring habits that shortens the other half.”

— Socrates

292. “Marry a good woman, and be happy the rest of your life. Or, marry a bad, and become a good philosopher.”

— Socrates

293. “Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.”

— Socrates

294. “Marry or marry not, in any either case you’ll regret it.”

— Socrates

295. “The same wind is blowing, and yet one of us may be cold and the other not.”

— Socrates

296. “The greatest of all mysteries is the man himself.”

— Socrates

297. “Why should I resent it when an ass kicks me?”

— Socrates

298. “I am very conscious that I am not wise at all.”

— Socrates

299. “I have not sought during my life to amass wealth and to adorn my body, but I have sought to adorn my soul with the jewels of wisdom, patience, and above all with a love of liberty.”

— Socrates

300. “What most counts is not merely to live, but to live right.”

— Socrates