Socrates

Remember, no human condition is ever permanent. Then you will not be overjoyed in good fortune nor too scornful in misfortune.

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

True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.

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

See one promontory, one mountain, one sea, one river and see all.

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

Everything that enlarges the sphere of human powers, that shows man he can do what he thought he could not do, is valuable.

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial “we.”

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

You are going to let the fear of poverty govern you life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.

Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.

The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people but if we tried to shut up the insane we would run out of building materials.

I don’t think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change.

Stress is caused by being here but wanting to be there.

It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

O Lord, help me not to despise or oppose what I do not understand.