Top 300 Socrates Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “False language, evil in itself, infects the soul with evil.”

— Socrates

252. “A disorderly mob is no more an army than a heap of building materials is a house.”

— Socrates

253. “An education obtained with money is worse than no education at all.”

— Socrates

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

— Socrates

255. “All wars are fought for the acquisition of wealth.”

— Socrates

256. “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

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

— Socrates

258. “Regard your good name as the richest jewel yoou can possibly be possessed of.”

— Socrates

259. “No man undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the meanest; yet everyone thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades, that of government.”

— Socrates

260. “The comic and the tragic lie inseparably close, like light and shadow.”

— Socrates

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

— Socrates

262. “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

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

— Socrates

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

— Socrates

265. “I love to go and see all the things I am happy without.”

— Socrates

266. “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

267. “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

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

— Socrates

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

— Socrates

270. “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

271. “Wars and revolutions and battles are due simply and solely to the body and its desires.”

— Socrates

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

— Socrates

273. “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

274. “Wars and revolutions and battles are due simply and solely to the body and its desires. All wars are undertaken for the acquisition of wealth; and the reason why we have to acquire wealth is the body, because we are slaves in its service.”

— Socrates

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

— Socrates

276. “No one does wrong voluntarily.”

— Socrates

277. “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

278. “Is it not, then, better to be ridiculous and friendly than clever and hostile?”

— Socrates

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

— Socrates

280. “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

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

— Socrates

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

— Socrates

283. “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

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

— Socrates

285. “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

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

— Socrates

287. “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

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

— Socrates

289. “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

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

— Socrates

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

— Socrates

292. “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

293. “She soars on her own wings.”

— Socrates

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

— Socrates

295. “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

296. “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

297. “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

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

— Socrates

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

— Socrates

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

— Socrates