"He is not only idle who does nothing but he is idle who might be better employed."

"I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live."

"Wisdom begins in wonder."

"From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate."

"By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities."

"I only know that I know nothing."

"Death may be the greatest of all human blessings."

"If it were said that without such bones and sinews and all the rest of them I should not be able to do what I think is right, it would be true; but to say that it is because of them that I do what I am doing, and not through choice of what is best - although my actions are controlled by Mind - would be a very lax and inaccurate form of expression."

"Four things belong to a judge: to hear courteously to answer wisely to consider soberly and to decide impartially."

"Beauty is a short-lived tyranny."

"One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice; and it is not right to return an injury, or to do evil to any man, however much we have suffered from him."

"As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent."

"Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence."

"False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil."

"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."

"No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew it was the greatest of evils."

"Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued."

"I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think."

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

"He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature."

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

"The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear."

"Is it true; is it kind, or is it necessary?"

"An honest man is always a child."

"Be as you wish to seem."

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

"To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge."

"There is one way, then, in which a man can be free from all anxiety about the fate of his soul - if in life he has abandoned bodily pleasures and adornments, as foreign to his purpose and likely to do more harm than good, and has devoted himself to the pleasures of acquiring knowledge, and so by decking his soul not with a borrowed beauty but with its own - with self-control, and goodness, and courage, and liberality, and truth - has fitted himself to await his journey in the next world."

"How many things there are which I do not want."

"The unexamined life is not worth living."

"I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance."

"I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good."

"The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him."

"I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing."

"Know thyself."

"A man who really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public, life if he is to survive for even a short time."

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

"I am a citizen not of Athens or Greece but of the world."

"The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be."

"Wisdom is knowing you know nothing."

"The misuse of language induces evil in the soul."

"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."

"Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for."

"Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel."

"The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms."

"You think that 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."

"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing."

"Do not trouble about those who practice philosophy, whether they are good or bad; but examine the thing itself well and carefully. And if philosophy appears a bad thing to you, turn every man from it, not only your sons; but if it appears to you such as I think it to be, take courage, pursue it, and practice it, as the saying is, 'both you and your house."

"Nobody is qualified to become a statesman who is entirely ignorant of the problems of wheat."

"Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart's desire the other is to get it."