Socrates

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

Be as you wish to seem.

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

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

Beauty is the bait which with delight allures man to enlarge his kind.

As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent.

The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.

He is a man of courage who does not run away, but remains at his post and fights against the enemy.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

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

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

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.

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

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

...I have had a remarkable experience. In the past the prophetic voice to which I have become accustomed has always been my constant companion, opposing me even in quite trivial things if I was going to take the wrong course. Now something has happened to me, as you can see, which might be thought and is commonly considered to be a supreme calamity; yet neither when I left home this morning, nor when I was taking my place here in court, nor at any point in any part of my speech did the divine sign oppose me. In other discussions it has often checked me in the middle of a sentence; but this time it has never opposed me in any part of this business in anything that I have said or done. What do I suppose to be the explanation? I will tell you. I suspect that this thing that has happened to me is a blessing, and we are quite mistaken in supposing death to be an evil. I have good grounds for thinking this, because my accustomed sign could not have failed to oppose me if what I was doing had not been sure to bring some good result.

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.

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.