The unexamined life is not worth living.

I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.

Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.

To find yourself, think for yourself.

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

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

He is wisest among you who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing.

I am wiser than this man; for neither of us appears to know anything great and good, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas I neither know nor think that I know.

Real wisdom is the property of the divine, and human wisdom has little or no value.

I cannot teach anybody anything; I can only make them think.

The highest form of knowledge is not to imagine that one knows what one does not know.

I attend as a midwife to the soul; the god compels me to foster the birth of truth in others, while withholding from me the power to produce it myself.

To know that which you know, and that which you do not know—this is the true nature of understanding.

Let us follow the argument wherever, like a wind, it may lead us.

An unconsidered opinion is like an untamed beast; only through rigorous cross-examination does it yield true understanding.

My barrenness of wisdom is no defect, but an invitation for truth to take birth in those who listen.

To be afraid of death is only another form of thinking that one is wise when one is not; for it is to think that one knows what one does not know.

I only wish that wisdom were of a kind that could flow from that which is full into that which is empty, if we only touched each other.

Do not value the applause of the crowd above the quiet verdict of reason.

He who knows what is right will do what is right, for no one voluntarily chooses that which he knows will harm his own nature.

True understanding begins when one is stripped of the conceit of knowledge.

The god appointed me to the duty of leading the philosophical life, examining myself and examining others.

Speak, that I may see you; for the soul reveals its stature through the words it chooses.

I would rather die having spoken after my manner, than speak in your manner and live.

The first and greatest victory is to conquer oneself; to be conquered by one's own weakness is of all things most shameful.

We approach nearest to the gods when we have the fewest wants.

Contentment is natural wealth; luxury is artificial poverty.

He is richest who is content with the least, for contentment is the true abundance of nature.

Do not let the unexamined opinions of the multitude dictate the health of your soul.

A life devoted solely to accumulation is a life lived in exile from the spirit.

I have never been anyone's teacher, but if anyone wishes to hear me speaking and pursuing my mission, I have never begrudged him the opportunity.

I spend my whole life in going about, persuading you not to care for your bodies or your wealth, but first and foremost to care about the greatest improvement of the soul.

Wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence brings about wealth and all other goods for men, both in public and in private.

Are you not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money and honor, while caring so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul?

It is the greatest good for an individual every day to converse about virtue, and to test oneself and others.

A man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether what he is doing is right or wrong.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death, nor are his affairs neglected by the gods.

Virtue does not come from money, but from virtue comes money and every other good of man, both public and private.

To prefer the preservation of the body over the integrity of the soul is to choose a gilded cage over eternal freedom.

There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.

The misuse of language induces evil in the soul; let your speech be pure and true to the measure of reality.

Pray simply for what is good, leaving the gods to decide what is truly good for us.

Nature has given us two ears, two eyes, and but one tongue—to the end we should hear and see more than we speak.

The secret of human freedom lies not in expanding our desires, but in learning to need less.

When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser.

Be slow to fall into friendship, but when you are in, continue firm and constant.

A genuine friend is another self, mirroring the virtue and striving of one's own spirit.

Do not grieve for that which you have not, but rejoice for that which you have.

The greatest honor you can pay to virtue is to practice it when no one is watching and no reward is promised.

Wisdom begins with self-discipline; an undisciplined mind is blown about by every passing wind of appetite.

Let him that would move the world first move himself.

The shortest and surest way to live with honor in the world is to be in reality what we would appear to be.

Other men live to eat, while I eat only to live.

Better to stumble while running toward the truth than to sit contentedly in the lap of error.

The soul takes nothing with her to the other world but her education and culture; at the beginning of the journey, this alone helps or harms her.

The beauty of the soul shines outward when a man bears with equanimity one heavy mischance after another, not because he does not feel them, but because he is a man of high and heroic temper.

One must never do wrong in return, nor mistreat any human being, no matter what one has suffered at their hands.

Doing wrong is worse than suffering wrong, and escaping punishment when one has done wrong is the greatest of all evils.

It is better to suffer an injustice than to commit one, for suffering an injustice harms only the body, but committing one ruins the soul.

If I were forced either to do wrong or to suffer wrong, I would choose to suffer rather than to do wrong.

Do not be angry with me for speaking the truth; for no man will preserve his life who genuinely opposes the multitude and prevents many unjust deeds from taking place.

He who would truly fight for justice, if he would survive even for a short time, must lead a private rather than a public life.

Neither in war nor in the courts of law ought any man to use every craft to escape death.

Wherever a man has taken a position that he believes to be best, there he must remain and face danger, taking into account neither death nor anything else before dishonor.

The difficult thing, my friends, is not to flee from death, but much rather to flee from wickedness, for it runs swifter than death.

I think it would be better for my lyre to be out of tune, and that the multitude should disagree with me, rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself.

A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it.

Can anything be more ridiculous than for a man to be in love with what harms him and hostile to what benefits him?

Not life, but a good life, is to be chiefly valued; and a good life is equivalent to a just and honorable life.

The comic and the tragic lie alongside each other; he who knows how to write the one should also know how to write the other.

No citizen has a right to be an amateur in the matter of physical and mental training; what a disgrace it is for a man to grow old without seeing the strength and beauty of which his body and mind are capable.

Regard your good name as the richest jewel you can possibly be possessed of; for credit is like fire; when once you have kindled it you may easily preserve it, but if you once extinguish it, you will find it an arduous task to rekindle it again.

Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions, but those who kindly reprove thy faults.

Do not let the noise of the marketplace drown the still, small voice of your inner daimonion.

To live unjustly is to carry a festering wound within the core of one's own being.

He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.

Envy is the ulcer of the soul.

Know thyself and be temperate—these two injunctions are in truth one and the same.

God has attached me to this city as to a great and noble horse which is sluggish by reason of its size and needs to be stirred by a gadfly.

You can do no harm to me; for it is not permitted that a better man be harmed by a worse.

A city where the citizens obey the laws is happy in peace and invincible in war.

Those who practice philosophy in the right way are in training for dying, and they fear death least of all men.

The body is the source of endless trouble to us by reason of the mere necessity of food; and is liable also to diseases which overtake and impede us in the search after true being.

If we would have pure knowledge of anything, we must be quit of the body; the soul in herself must behold things in themselves.

You may bury my body however you please, if only you can catch me, and I do not slip away from you.

Be of good cheer about death, and know of this truth: that no evil can happen to a good man, whether in life or after death.

The soul, being immortal and having been born many times, and having seen all things that exist, has learned all things.

All true learning is nothing other than recollection, the awakening of what the soul already carries within itself.

The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better only the divine knows.

Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius; pay it and do not neglect it.

The greatest blessing granted to human beings is love, when guided by the yearning for divine wisdom.

Love is the pursuit of whole, the longing to be restored to that original unity from which we fell.

He who has not the spirit of philosophy will wander through life as a stranger in his own home.

When you want wisdom and insight as badly as you want air when you are under water, then you will have it.

To know oneself is to understand the boundaries of one's power and the depth of one's responsibility.

The gods give nothing that is really good and noble without labor and careful attention.

We shall be better and braver and less helpless if we believe that one must search for what one does not know, than if we believe it impossible to find.

Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and the inward man be at one.

May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as a temperate man and he alone can bear and carry.

Temperance is the health of the soul; without it, all other virtues are as water poured into a broken sieve.

I am not only now but always a man who obeys nothing in me except the reason that seems best to me upon reflection.

It is better to change an opinion than to persist in a wrong one simply to save face.

No man undertakes a trade he has not learned, yet everyone thinks himself qualified for the hardest of all trades—that of living well.

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions when severed from the anchor of reason.

To be self-controlled, patient, and content with simple things is the true nobility of the philosopher.

Men of Athens, I honor and love you; but I will obey the god rather than you, and as long as I have breath and strength I will never cease from philosophy.

The wound is the place where the light enters you.

What you seek is seeking you.

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.

Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.