Socrates (c.469–399 BCE) was the Greek philosopher considered the father of western philosophy. Socrates’s most famous student, Plato, taught Aristotle, who later tutored Alexander the Great. By this progression, Greek philosophy, as first developed by Socrates, spread throughout the known world during Alexander’s conquests.
Socrates, like his father, was a prominent stonemason before fighting in the Peloponnesian War. His father’s bequest was adequate for Socrates to live moderately in Athens without working.
Socrates’s focus as a philosopher was on living a good and virtuous life. He inspired his followers to think for themselves instead of following society’s prescriptions and the accepted superstitions regarding the gods. According to Plato, Socrates declared, “An unexamined life is not worth living” (Apology, 38b.)
Socrates gained a reputation as a questioner of everything and everyone. His method of teaching—celebrated as the Socratic Method—entailed not conveying knowledge directly, but instead asking question after clarifying question until his students reached their understanding by exposing and dispelling errors.
Socrates is a mystery, even amongst philosophers. He did not find a school or leave any writings. His reputation as one of history’s greatest philosophers was created by disciples such as Plato and Xenophon rather than through the efforts of Socrates himself. All known information about Socrates is second-hand, and most of it vigorously disputed.
Socrates’s habit of crushing influential figures in debate garnered him more enemies than followers. Socrates was convicted and sentenced to death for corrupting the Athenian youth by “denying the gods recognized by the state and introducing new divinities, and, secondly, of corrupting the young.” He died by drinking an executioner’s cup of poisonous hemlock, surrounded by his friends and disciples in his prison cell in Athens. Per Plato, “Such was the end of our friend, a man, I think, who was the wisest and justest, and the best man I have ever known” (Phaedo, pp. 118.)
Socrates’s influence was felt directly in the actions of his disciples as they formed their analysis of his life, teachings, and death. They launched their philosophical schools and wrote about their experiences with their teacher.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Socrates
The rest of the world lives to eat, while I eat to live.
—Socrates
Topics: Weight, One liners
I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.
—Socrates
Topics: Teachers, Teaching, Education
Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions, but those who kindly reprove thy faults.
—Socrates
Topics: Reform, Criticism, Correction, Praise
I pray thee, O God, that I may be beautiful within.
—Socrates
Topics: Love, Beauty
I am not an Athenian or a Greek, I am a citizen of the world.
—Socrates
Topics: Race, Racism, Perspective
If you love knowledge, you will be a master of knowledge. What you have come to know, pursue by exercise; what you have not learned, seek to add to your knowledge, for it is as reprehensible to hear a profitable saying and not grasp it as to be offered a good gift by one’s friends and not accept it. Believe that many precepts are better than much wealth, for wealth quickly fails us, but precepts abide through all time.
—Socrates
Topics: Knowledge
I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.
—Socrates
Topics: Intelligence
Wisdom begins in wonder.
—Socrates
Topics: Wisdom
My advice to you is to get married. If you find a good wife, you’ll be happy; if not, you’ll become a philosopher.
—Socrates
Topics: Advice, Philosophy, Good, Marriage, Wife, Happy, Become, Vice
Fame is the perfume of heroic deeds.
—Socrates
Topics: Fame, One liners
Worthless people live only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.
—Socrates
Topics: Food, Eating, Drinking
The Delphic oracle said I was the wisest of all the Greeks. It is because that I alone, of all the Greeks, know that I know nothing.
—Socrates
Topics: Wisdom
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.
—Socrates
Topics: Knowledge
I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live.
—Socrates
Topics: Politics
Be of good cheer about death, and know of a certainty, that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.
—Socrates
Topics: Death
They who provide much wealth for their children but neglect to improve them in virtue, do like those who feed their horses high, but never train them to be useful.
—Socrates
Topics: Inheritance
The shortest and surest way to live with honor in the world, is to be in reality what we would appear to be; and if we observe, we shall find, that all human virtues increase and strengthen themselves by the practice and experience of them.
—Socrates
Topics: Sincerity, Honesty, Character, Hypocrisy, World
Remember, no human condition is ever permanent. Then you will not be overjoyed in good fortune nor too scornful in misfortune.
—Socrates
Topics: Change
The fewer our wants, the nearer we resemble the gods.
—Socrates
Give me beauty in the inward soul; may the outward and the inward man be at one.
—Socrates
Topics: Control
Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm and constant.
—Socrates
Topics: Friends, Friendship
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
—Socrates
Topics: Youth, The Past
The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms.
—Socrates
Topics: Wisdom
Wind puffs up empty bladders; opinion, fools.
—Socrates
Topics: Opinion, Conceit
The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him.
—Socrates
Topics: Nature, Life
The fewer our wants the more we resemble the Gods.
—Socrates
Topics: Desire, Desires
Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.
—Socrates
Topics: Beauty
It is the greatest good for an individual to discuss virtue (aka Kindness, Virtue, Goodness) every day…for the unexamined life is not worth living.
—Socrates
Topics: Education, Reflection, Life, Growth
Slavery is a system of outrage and robbery.
—Socrates
Topics: Slavery
Beware the banality of a busy life.
—Socrates
False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.
—Socrates
Topics: Attitude
If I can assign names as well as pictures to objects, the right assignment of them we may call truth, and the wrong assignment of them falsehood.
—Socrates
An education obtained with money is worse than no education at all
—Socrates
Topics: Education
Do not be angry with me if I tell you the truth
—Socrates
Topics: Truth
True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.
—Socrates
Topics: Wisdom, Virtues
If a man would move the world, he must first move himself.
—Socrates
Topics: Secrets of Success
Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.
—Socrates
Topics: Contentment, Luxury, One liners
Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.
—Socrates
The soul is pure when it leaves the body and drags nothing bodily with it, by virtue of having no willing association with the body in life but avoiding it…….Practicing philosophy in the right way is a training to die easily.
—Socrates
Topics: Death
Philebus was saying that enjoyment and pleasure and delight, and the class of feelings akin to them, are a good to every living being, whereas I contend, that not these, but wisdom and intelligence and memory, and their kindred, right opinion and true reasoning, are better and more desirable than pleasure
—Socrates
Topics: Intelligence
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