Socrates

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Let him that would move the world, first move himself.

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

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

The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less.

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.

If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity… The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

Goodness is the only investment which never fails.

We must train hard. It’s not about denying a weakness may exist but about denying its right to persist.

Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.

Sense never fails to give them that have it, Words enough to make them understood. It too often happens in some conversations, as in Apothecary Shops, that those Pots that are Empty, or have Things of small Value in them, are as gaudily Dress’d as those that are full of precious Drugs. They that soar too high, often fall hard, making a low and level Dwelling preferable. The tallest Trees are most in the Power of the Winds, and Ambitious Men of the Blasts of Fortune. Buildings have need of a good Foundation, that lie so much exposed to the Weather.

We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.

People care more about being thought to have taste than about being thought either good, clever or amiable.

It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years?… What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

Words will not fail when the matter is well considered.

Winning is not a sometime thing; it’s an all the time thing. You don’t win once in a while… you don’t do things right once in a while… you do them right all the time. Winning is habit.

I desire to gain your Love and Friendship by a kind, Just and Peaceful Life.