Socrates

Philebus was saying that enjoyment and pleasure and delight, and the class of feelings akin to them, are a good to every living being, whereas I contend, that not these, but wisdom and intelligence and memory, and their kindred, right opinion and true reasoning, are better and more desirable than pleasure

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

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

Once made equal to man, woman becomes his superior.

No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.

The nearest way to glory is to strive to be what you wish to be thought to be.

It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves.

It was prettily devised of Aesop, The fly sat on the axle tree of the chariot wheel and said, what dust do I raise!

What is the imagination? Only an arm or weapon of the interior energy; only the precursor of the reason.

People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.

She has lost the art of conversation, but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.

Leisure may be defined as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes, labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation.

The only reward of virtue is virtue the only way to have a friend is to be one.

Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.

You’ll never get anywhere if you go about what-iffing like that. Would Columbus have discovered America if he’d said ‘What if I sink on the way over? What if I meet pirates? What if I never come back?’ He wouldn’t even have started.

If there is something to gain and nothing to lose by asking, by all means ask!

Sir, you have but two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

A man is known by the books he reads, by the company he keeps, by the praise he gives, by his dress, by his tastes, by his distastes, by the stories he tells, by his gait, by the notion of his eye, by the look of his house, of his chamber; for nothing on earth is solitary but every thing hath affinities infinite.

That’s what I can’t stand. I know I’ll bounce back, and that’s what I can’t stand.

All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.