653 Quotes by Socrates

If I save my insight, I don’t attend to weakness of eyesight.

By means of beauty, all beautiful things become beautiful.

Rather you marry or not,you'll regret.

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world."[As quoted in Plutarch's Of Banishment]

...[T]hese people... are my dangerous accusers; because those who hear them suppose that anyone who inquires into such matters... theories about the heavens... and everything below the earth... must be an atheist.

Do you feel no compunction, Socrates, at having followed a line of action which puts you in danger of the death penalty?'I might fairly reply to him, 'You are mistaken, my friend, if you think that a man who is worth anything ought to spend his time weighing up the prospects of life and death. He has only one thing to consider in performing any action--that is, whether he is acting rightly or wrongly, like a good man or a bad one.

I was attached to this city by the god—though it seems a ridiculous thing to say—as upon a great and noble horse which was somewhat sluggish because of its size and needed to be stirred up by a kind of gadfly. It is to fulfill some such function that I believe the god has placed me in the city. I never cease to rouse each and every one of you, to persuade and reproach youall day long and everywhere I find myself in your company.

The mind is everything; what you think you become!

...[B]y observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my other senses I might blind my soul altogether... [like] when [people] watch and study an eclipse of the sun; they really do sometimes injure their eyes, unless they study its reflection in water or some other medium.