“Our prayers should be for blessings in general, for God knows best what is good for us.”

“I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good.”

“How many are the things I can do without!”

“I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live.”

“Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.”

“The hottest love has the coldest end.”

“See one promontory, one mountain, one sea, one river and see all.”

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

“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.”

“When desire, having rejected reason and overpowered judgment which leads to right, is set in the direction of the pleasure which beauty can inspire, and when again under the influence of its kindred desires it is moved with violent motion towards the beauty of corporeal forms, it acquires a surname from this very violent motion, and is called love.”

“I pray Thee, O God, that I may be beautiful within.”

“The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear. ”

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

“In childhood be modest, in youth temperate, in adulthood just, and in old age prudent.”

“The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him.”

“We are in fact convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things by themselves with the soul by itself. It seems, to judge from the argument, that the wisdom which we desire and upon which we profess to have set our hearts will be attainable only when we are dead and not in our lifetime.”

“Nothing is to be preferred before justice.”

“Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.”

“Let him that would move the world, first move himself.”

“The comic and the tragic lie inseparably close, like light and shadow.”

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

“Call no man unhappy until he is married.”

“Happiness is unrepentant pleasure.”

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

“Wars and revolutions and battles are due simply and solely to the body and its desires. All wars are undertaken for the acquisition of wealth; and the reason why we have to acquire wealth is the body, because we are slaves in its service.”

“No man undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the meanest; yet everyone thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades, that of government.”

“The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.”

“The nearest way to glory is to strive to be what you wish to be thought to be.”

“Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm and constant.”

“Enjoy yourself — it’s later than you think.”

“Worthless people love only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.”

“Once made equal to man, woman becomes his superior.”

“Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?”

“Fame is the perfume of heroic deeds.”

“The envious person grows lean with the fatness of their neighbor.”

“From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.”

“An education obtained with money is worse than no education at all.”

“Whom do I call educated? First, those who manage well the circumstances they encounter day by day. Next, those who are decent and honorable in their intercourse with all men, bearing easily and good naturedly what is offensive in others and being as agreeable and reasonable to their associates as is humanly possible to be… those who hold their pleasures always under control and are not ultimately overcome by their misfortunes… those who are not spoiled by their successes, who do not desert their true selves but hold their ground steadfastly as wise and sober — minded men.”

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

“The fewer our wants the more we resemble the Gods.”

“Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart’s desire; the other is to get it.”

“A multitude of books distracts the mind.”

“Whenever, therefore, people are deceived and form opinions wide of the truth, it is clear that the error has slid into their minds through the medium of certain resemblances to that truth.”

“If I tell you that I would be disobeying the god and on that account it is impossible for me to keep quiet, you won’t be persuaded by me, taking it that I am ionizing. And if I tell you that it is the greatest good for a human being to have discussions every day about virtue and the other things you hear me talking about, examining myself and others, and that the unexamined life is not livable for a human being, you will be even less persuaded.”

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

“To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them: but they fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?”

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

“Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.”

“Give me beauty in the inward soul; may the outward and the inward man be at one.”

“He is rich who is content with the least; for contentment is the wealth of nature.”