Socrates

To find yourself, think for yourself.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

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

I am not an Athenian, nor a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

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

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

His scorn of the great is repeated too often to be real; no man thinks much of that which he despises.

Universities are of course hostile to geniuses, which, seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the routine: as churches and monasteries persecute youthful saints.

Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size.

If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content.

A patronizing disposition always has its meaner side.

Many of the truths that we cling to depend on our point of view.

It is very strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them.

With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.

Haste makes Work which Caution prevents.

Although the masters make the rules for the wise men and the fools got nothing, Ma, to live up to.

If you learn to practice love, compassion, joy, and equanimity, you will know how to heal the illnesses of anger, sorrow, insecurity, sadness, hatred, loneliness, and unhealthy attachments.

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change thing I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.