Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Socrates. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Socrates Quotes And Sayings by 79 Authors including Plato,John Crowe Ransom,Walter Lippmann,Ruth Downie,Anton Chekhov for you to enjoy and share.

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All of a sudden he will catch sight of something wonderfully beautiful in its nature; that, Socrates, is the reason for all his earlier labors
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In all the good Greek of Plato
I lack my roastbeef and potato.

A better man was Aristotle,
Pulling steady on the bottle.
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The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth.
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Socrates was a wise man. Surveying the goods on a market stall, the great one was said to have remarked, What a lot of things a man doesn't need!
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Men of Athens, I honor and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy ... Understand that I shall never alter my ways, not even if I have to die many times.
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It's easier to write about Socrates than about a young woman or a cook.
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All men are mortal. Socrates was mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates.
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The story goes that one day Socrates stood gazing at a stall that sold all
kinds of wares. Finally he said, What a lot of things I don't need!
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Anyone who can look me in the eye and say they prefer the story of Moses or Jesus or Mohammed to the life of Socrates is intellectually defective.
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It's all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at those schools!
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Socrates defines his life's mission as awakening the Athenians to the supreme importance of attending to their souls. His timeless plea that we connect to ourselves remains the only way for any of us to truly thrive.
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Did you hear the story of Socrates? He was a philosopher in ancient Greece, so they killed him.
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You may not be rich with money, Socrates was not, your life still has tremendous value.
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All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.
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The story is told of Socrates walking through the market in Athens, with its groaning abundance of options, and saying to himself, "Who would have thought that there could be so many things that I can do without?"4
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Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.
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Pythagoras, Locke, Socrates - but pages might be filled up, as vainly as before, with the sad usage of all sorts of sages, who in his life-time, each was deemed a bore! The loftiest minds outrun their tardy ages.
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Socrates insisted that there's a strong connection between your philosophy (how you interpret the world, what you think is important in life) and your mental and physical health. Different beliefs lead to different emotional states...
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Socrates, in Plato, formulates ideas of order: the Iliad, like Shakespeare, knows that a violent disorder is a great order.
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I read a lot of Socrates in the off-season. Don't print that, or it'll ruin my rep.
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Socrates splits himself into two, so that there are two Socrates: the Socrates who knows in advance how the discussion is going to end, and the Socrates who travels the entire dialectical path along with his interlocutor.
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Again what city ever received Plato's or Aristotle's laws, or Socrates' precepts? But,
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It is commonly a dangerous thing for a man to have more sense than his neighbors. Socrates paid for his superiority with his life; and if Aristotle saved his skin, it was by taking to his heels in time.
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If Socrates died like a philosopher, Jesus Christ died like a God.
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The Sophists' paradoxical talk pieces and their public debates were entertainment in 5th century Greece. And in that world, Socrates was an entertainer.
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But Socrates cannot but have been meditating upon something? ... Can he ever remain solitary with himself
and silent to his very soul!
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My metaphysical thinking is more in alignment with Plato rather than Aristotle's."


~R. Alan Woods [2013]
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If Christianity was morality, Socrates would be the Saviour.
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Socrates may have thought himself to be the wisest in Athens, but King Solomon was the wisest in the world. With all his philosophy Socrates died a poor man, and with all his wisdom King Solomon died a rich man.
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Imitate Jesus and Socrates
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Oh, if Plato could see me now ! Aristotle, traveler of time!
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And Agathon said, It is probable, Socrates, that I knew nothing of what I had said.
And yet spoke you beautifully, Agathon, he said.
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SOCRATES: But you do say that he who is a good rhapsode is also a good general. ION: Certainly.
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If Socrates was alive today he would say : I know that I know everything. That's what contemporary philosophers do.
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Socrates: So was I.
Bertha: Are you saying you're as great as him, then?
Socrates: No, no, on the contrary, I'm assuming just the opposite!
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As a Roman philosopher, Cicero, said of him a few hundred years later, Socrates 'called philosophy down from the sky and established her in the towns and introduced her into homes and forced her to investigate life, ethics, good and evil.
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The usual picture of Socrates is of an ugly little plebeian who inspired a handsome young nobleman to write long dialogues on large topics.
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Out of them all, Socrates is the hardest to deconstruct ... Indeed, he may just be indeconstructible.
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Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.
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So then there was the Greek, Socrates, he was great ... He invented questioning. Before Socrates, no questioning. Everyone sort of went, 'Yeah, I suppose so.
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An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise.
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Live and die in Aristotle's works.
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Socrates counts among those great minds who actually cultivated doubt in the name of truth.
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Teaching, said Socrates, is the reeducation of desire.
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Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.
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Plato judged right, that except kings themselves became philosophers, they who from their childhood are corrupted with false notions would never fall in entirely with the counsels of philosophers, and this he himself found to be true in the person of Dionysius.
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Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.
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Socrates woke to the ideal of dispassionate intelligence, Jesus to the ideal of passionate yet self-oblivious worship. Socrates urged intellectual integrity, Jesus integrity of will. Each, of course, though starting with a different emphasis, involved the other.
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There are not in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and understand Plato:-never enough to pay for an edition of his works; yet to every generation these come duly down, for the sake of those few persons, as if God brought them written in his hand.
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It is Plato's portrait of Socrates that has inspired thinkers in the Western world for nearly 2.500 years.
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By Hercules! I prefer to err with Plato, whom I know how much you value, than to be right in the company of such men.
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Plato's concern is not just an intellectual issue, but it is knitted with emotional life as well.
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Aristotle, I swear that kid is going to get himself killed one of these days. He's a dumbass at the genetic level.
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Socrates called himself a midwife of ideas. A great book is often such a midwife, delivering to full existence what has been coiled like an embryo in the dark, silent depths of the brain.
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Nay, Socrates," said Glaucon, "the measure of listening to such discussions is the whole of life for reasonable men". The Republic, 450c.
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I suspect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity.
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Words, words, words. Polonius
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Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead.
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In PLATO AT THE GOOGLEPLEX, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein set out to showcase, in sometimes startling ways, the continuing relevance of a classic philosopher. But what's remarkable is that she actually brings off this tour de force with both madcap brilliance and commanding authority.
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Aristotle ... a mere bond-servant to his logic, thereby rendering it contentious ...
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Socrates had a student named Plato, Plato had a student named Aristotle, and Aristotle had a student named Alexander the Great.
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It is extraordinary to think about. We still speak of Socratic or Platonic philosophy, but actually being Plato or Socrates is quite another matter.
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Men of Athens, I honor and I love you, but I will obey the god rather than you and as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practice philosophy, to exhort you and in my usual way to point out to any one of you whom I happen to meet.
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It was the first and most striking characteristic of Socrates never to become heated in discourse, never to utter an injurious or insulting word
on the contrary, he persistently bore insult from others and thus put an end to the fray.
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I like people who like Plato.
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Aristotle was by far a less able thinker than Plato ... he was completely overwhelmed by Plato.
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Today Plato is nearly forgotten. His beliefs include the notion that people who govern should be intelligent, rational, self-controlled, and in love with wisdom, an idea that has long been discredited.
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Never call yourself a philosopher, nor talk a great deal among the unlearned about theorems, but act conformably to them. Thus, at an entertainment, don't talk how persons ought to eat, but
eat as you ought. For remember that in this manner Socrates also universally avoided all ostentation.
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Thus Socrates became perfect, improving himself by everything. attending to nothing but reason. And though you are not yet a Socrates, you ought, however, to live as one desirous of becoming a Socrates. 51.
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Socrates used to call the opinions of the many by the name of Lamiae, bugbears to frighten children.
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Man's greatest privilege is the discussion of virtue Socrates in The Apology.
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That fact that Athens could condemn its noblest citizen to death did more than make a profound impression on him. It was to shape the course of his entire philosophic endeavor.
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In 80% of Socrates' dialogues there was no constructive outcome. He saw his role as simply pointing out what was wrong.
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What do you think Socrates meant when he said, "The unexamined life is not worth living"? Third,
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It is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.
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The difference between Socrates and Jesus is that no one had ever been put to death in Socrates' name. And that is because Socrates' ideas were never made law. Law, in whatever name, protects privilege.
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[Aristotle] was the most eminent of all the pupils of Plato ... He seceded from Plato while he was still alive; so that they tell a story that [Plato] said, Aristotle has kicked us off, just as chickens do their mother after they have been hatched.
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Good teachers get fired; great teachers, killed--Socrates, Christ, and Giordano Bruno.
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There you have Socrates' wisdom; [b] he himself isn't willing to teach, but he goes around learning from others and isn't even grateful to them.
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Behold, he said, the wisdom of Socrates; he refuses to teach himself, and goes about learning of others, to whom he never even says Thank you.
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Like mythology, Greek philosophy has a tendency to personify ideas. And the Sophist is not merely a teacher of rhetoric for a fee of one or fifty drachmae (Crat.), but an ideal of Plato's in which the falsehood of all mankind is reflected.
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All cats die. Socrates is dead. Therefore Socrates is a cat.
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Socrates had it wrong; it is not the unexamined but finally the uncommitted life that is not worth living.
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I wonder if Socrates would have appreciated the flagrant irony: It's only because his pupils Plato and Xenophon put his disdain for the written word into written words that we have any knowledge of it today
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Given that Socrates was effectively assassinated by poison, you might think twice before accepting his invitation to breakfast.
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Euripides questioned everything. He was a misanthrope who preferred books to men.
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Losing love is so rich a philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.
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Socrates, one of the greatest philosophers of all time, took his whole life to get to the point where he said, As for me, all I know is that I know nothing.
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How brave a thing is freedom of speech, which has made the Athenians so far exceed every other state of Hellas in greatness!
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Death is not dreadful or else it would have appeared dreadful to Socrates.
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The wisest of you men is he who has realized, like Socrates, that in respect of wisdom he is really worthless.
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I know what the Greeks do not know, incertitude.
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At Athens, wise men propose, and fools dispose.
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I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates.
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..they all emulated and admired and were students of Spartan education, could tell their wisdom was of this sort by the brief but memorable remarks they each uttered when they met, writing what is on every man's lips: Know thyself, and Nothing too much.
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Professors of Greek forget or are unaware that Thomas Aquinas, who did not know Greek, was a better interpreter of Aristotle than any of them have proved to be, not only because he was smarter but because he took Aristotle more seriously.
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A men whose every word is nothing but the truth is not a human being but a god! Gods do not die, whereas Aristotle is lying in a grave now.
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Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery.
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The author's Socrates admonishes paramount awareness human limitations. If we do good to those we evaluate as good and evil to those we evaluate at the evil, and we are wrong, we have been made the world less just.
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I conceived 'All Is Song' as a modernised, loosely interpreted version of Socrates's life.