Socrates

The hour of departure has arrived and we go our ways; I to die, and you to live. Which is better? Only God knows.

Nothing is to be preferred before justice.

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

Worthless people love only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.

Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.

The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.

For who is pleased with himself.

A man must make his opportunity, as oft as find it.

Everyone has his day and some days last longer than others.

I think we foreshorten our own viewpoint if we consider any state of mind, or society, or government as final. Growth and change! We can’t get away from them.

We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.

I do not hold that we should rearm in order to fight. I hold that we should rearm in order to parley.

Of what significance are the things you can forget.

Be careless in your dress if you will, but keep a tidy soul.

Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.

What drives me to be who I am, to do all that I do, is not what words will be engraved for my epitaph. What drives me to be who I am, to do what I do, is not vanity, is not for adulation in the eyes of others. What drives me is my own desire to be better; to be happy. When I am dead and buried, the words above will not bring me back to life, I choose to live out my epitaph, and not just for it to be a collection of words someone has chosen to define me.

When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

Republics abound in young civilians who believe that the laws make the city, that grave modifications of the policy and modes of living and employments of the population, that commerce, education and religion may be voted in or out; and that any measure, though it were absurd, may be imposed on a people if only you can get sufficient voices to make it a law. But the wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand which perishes in the twisting; that the State must follow and not lead the character and progress of the citizen; that the form of government which prevails is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it. The law is only a memorandum.

Good breeding, a union of kindness and independence.

Nature hates calculators.

To succeed in the other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law, concealment of it will do.