Socrates: Trending quotes (page 6)

“[In what way would you have us bury you? ] In any way that you like; only you must get hold of me, and take care that I do not walk away from you. …I cannot make Crito believe that I am the same Socrates who have been talking and conducting the argument; he fancies that I am the other Socrates whom he will soon see, a dead body… And though I have spoken many words in the endeavor to show that when I have drunk the poison I shall leave you and go to the joys of the blessed—these words of mine, with which I comforted you and myself, have had, I perceive, no effect upon Crito. …you should be my surety to him that I shall not remain, but go away and depart; and then he will suffer less at my death, and not be grieved when he sees my body being burned or buried.”

“All men's souls are immortal, but the souls of the righteous are immortal and divine.”

“One thing I know, that I know nothing. This is the source of my wisdom.”

“Be as you wish to seem.”

“It is necessary to learn geometry only so far as might enable a man to measure land for the purposes of buying and selling.”

“To begin well is not a trifling thing, but yet not far from a trifling thing.”

“What I have understood is good; and so, I think, what I have not understood is; only the book requires a Delian diver to get at the meaning of it.”

“Whichever you do, you will repent it.”

“Do you, then, repent of not being a tyrant too?”

“Why was my own dress good enough to live in, and not good enough to die in?”

“It is a very fine speech, Lysias, but is not suitable for me; for it was manifestly the speech of a lawyer, rather than of a philosopher.”

“Just as fine clothes and handsome shoes would not be suitable to me.”

“Follow me, then, and learn.”

“If we are to use women for the same things as the men, we must also teach them the same things.”

“He [Socrates] would say that the rest of the world lived to eat, while he himself ate to live.”

“If any man could arrive at the exterior limit, or take the wings of a bird and fly upward, like a fish who puts his head out and sees the world, he would see a world beyond; and, if the nature of man could sustain this sight, he would acknowledge that this was the place of the true heaven and the true light and the true stars. For this earth, and the stones, and the entire region which surrounds us, are spoilt and corroded…”

“Someone will say: Yes, Socrates, but cannot you hold your tongue, and then you may go into a foreign city, and no one will interfere with you? Now I have great difficulty in making you understand my answer to this. For if I tell you that this would be a disobedience to a divine command, and therefore that I cannot hold my tongue, you will not believe that I am serious; and if I say that the greatest good of a man is daily to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that the life which is unexamined is not worth living — that you are still less likely to believe.”

“…do not courageous men endure death because they are afraid of yet greater evils? …Then all but philosophers are courageous only from fear, and because they are afraid; and yet that a man should be courageous from fear, and because he is a coward, is surely a strange thing.”

“Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.”