Socrates Quotations

'Matisse and Picasso' is a little like Plato after Socrates. Socrates only taught in words. He didn't write. And after that, you had Plato and Aristotle to write about what he had said. I write about them because they didn't write about them.

Since Socrates and Plato first speculated on the nature of the human mind, serious thinkers through the ages - from Aristotle to Descartes, from Aeschylus to Strindberg and Ingmar Bergman - have thought it wise to understand oneself and one's behavior.

When I look around, I begin to understand what Socrates meant when he said, 'How much there is in the world I do not want.'

Wherever magistrates were appointed from among those who complied with the injunctions of the laws, Socrates considered the government to be an aristocracy.

In ancient Greece, Socrates reportedly didn't fancy a literate society. He felt that people would lose the capacity to think for themselves, simply adopting the perspective of a handy written opinion, and that they would cease to remember what could be written down.

My hero Socrates trained Plato on a rock. How much did that cost? So the greatest minds in history became the greatest minds in history without spending a lot of money.

God was alive when this universe exploded into existence. He was alive when Socrates drank his poison. He was the living God when William Bradford governed Plymouth Colony. He was the living God in 1966 when Thomas Altizer proclaimed him dead and Time magazine absolutely absurdly put it on the front cover.

I can easily imagine Socrates in Alexander's place; Alexander in that of Socrates - never

What I always liked about Socrates was his insistence on questioning things for the sake of reaching some sort of clarity - even if it is only clarity about the gaps in our knowledge.

Confucius, who was born in the sixth century B.C., traditionally had a stature in China akin to that of Socrates in the West.

The Platonic Socrates was a pattern to subsequent Philosophers for many ages. As a man, we may believe him admitted to the communion of saints; but as a philosopher he needs a long residence in a scientific purgatory

Do you remember the Platonic dialog in which Socrates argues the definition of wisdom with Hippocrates? As far as I'm concerned, Hippocrates was the first hippy, a guy who was smug because he thought he knew something. Socrates was wise because he realized how little he knew.

Socrates had a student named Plato, Plato had a student named Aristotle, and Aristotle had a student named Alexander the Great.

Socrates was famously executed for his philosophical and political beliefs. I wondered what would happen if you had a similar character, who was so relentlessly questioning of everything? In a modern society, would we be any more or any less tolerant of that kind of character?

In that prehistoric time, before the Internet, before information floated in the ozone, I was a soccer novice who had never heard of Socrates until somebody pointed him out - swarthy, shaggy, tall, slender, mysterious.

How often when they find a sage, As sweet as Socrates or Plato; They hand him hemlock for his wage, Or bake him like a sweet potato! Donald R

Socrates gave as his reason for declining an invitation to the court of Perdiccas, "I have no wish to go down to my grave with ignominy;" implying that he would accept no favor which he could not repay

By all means marry. If you get a good wife you will become happy, and if you get a bad one you will become a philosopher. Socrates (470-399 B.C.)