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(no category)
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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
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Authors & Writing
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Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.
-Socrates
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Beauty
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Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.
-Socrates
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Change
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Remember, no human condition is ever permanent. Then you will not be overjoyed in good fortune nor too scornful in misfortune.
-Socrates
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Contentment
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He is rich who is content with the least; for contentment is the wealth of nature.
-Socrates
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Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.
-Socrates
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Control
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Give me beauty in the inward soul; may the outward and the inward man be at one.
-Socrates
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Death
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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 know 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?
-Socrates, from Plato's Apology
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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
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The hour of departure has arrived and we go our ways; I to die, and you to live. Which is better? Only God knows.
-Socrates
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Deception/Lying
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False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.
-Socrates
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Desires
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Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart's desire; the other is to get it.
-Socrates
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The fewer our wants the more we resemble the Gods.
-Socrates
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Education
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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.
-Socrates
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An education obtained with money is worse than no education at all
-Socrates
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Enjoyment
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Enjoy yourself -- it's later than you think.
-Socrates
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Envy / Jealousy
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The envious person grows lean with the fatness of their neighbor.
-Socrates
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Evil
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There is only one good -- knowledge; and only one evil -- ignorance.
-Socrates
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The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.
-Socrates
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Fame
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Fame is the perfume of heroic deeds.
-Socrates
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Food
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Worthless people love only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.
-Socrates
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Friends
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Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm and constant.
-Socrates
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Glory
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The nearest way to glory is to strive to be what you wish to be thought to be.
-Socrates
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Government
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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.
-Socrates
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Greed
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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.
-Socrates
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Happiness
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Happiness is unrepentant pleasure.
-Socrates
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Call no man unhappy until he is married.
-Socrates
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Hate
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From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.
-Socrates
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Humanity
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I am not an Athenian, nor a Greek, but a citizen of the world.
-Socrates
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Humor
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The comic and the tragic lie inseparably close, like light and shadow.
-Socrates
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Insults
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Slanderers do not hurt me because they do not hit me.
-Socrates
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Intelligence
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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
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Justice
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Nothing is to be preferred before justice.
-Socrates
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Knowledge
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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
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One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing.
-Socrates
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Last Words
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Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?
-Socrates
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Leadership
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Let him that would move the world, first move himself.
-Socrates
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Life
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The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him.
-Socrates
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In childhood be modest, in youth temperate, in adulthood just, and in old age prudent.
-Socrates
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Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.
-Socrates
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Listening
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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.
-Socrates
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Love
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The hottest love has the coldest end.
-Socrates
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I pray Thee, O God, that I may be beautiful within.
-Socrates
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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.
-Socrates
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Marriage
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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.
-Socrates
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Morals
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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.
-Socrates
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Nature
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See one promontory, one mountain, one sea, one river and see all.
-Socrates
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Philosophy
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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.
-Socrates
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My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you
-Socrates
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Poetry
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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.
-Socrates
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Politics
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I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live.
-Socrates
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Potential
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I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good.
-Socrates
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Prayer
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Our prayers should be for blessings in general, for God knows best what is good for us.
-Socrates
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Property
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How many are the things I can do without!
-Socrates
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Purpose
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They are not only idle who do nothing, but they are idle also who might be better employed.
-Socrates
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Reading
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A multitude of books distracts the mind.
-Socrates
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Reflection
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I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous. And therefore I bid farewell to all this; the common opinion is enough for me. For, as I was saying, I want to know not about this, but about myself: am I a monster more complicated and swollen with passion than the serpent Typho, or a creature of a gentler and simpler sort, to whom Nature has given a diviner and lowlier destiny?
-Socrates, Plato
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The unexamined life is not worth living.
-Socrates
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Reform, Correction
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Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions, but those who kindly reprove thy faults.
-Socrates
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Reputation
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The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.
-Socrates
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Respect
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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.
-Socrates
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Revenge
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One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice; and it is not right to return an injury, or to do evil to any man, however much we have suffered from him.
-Socrates
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Senses
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I was afraid that by observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my other senses I might blind my soul altogether.
-Socrates
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Teaching
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I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.
-Socrates
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Thought
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To find yourself, think for yourself.
-Socrates
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Truth
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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.
-Socrates
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Do not be angry with me if I tell you the truth
-Socrates
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Wealth
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What a lot of things there are a man can do without.
-Socrates
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If a man is proud of his wealth, he should not be praised until it is known how he employs it.
-Socrates
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He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.
-Socrates
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Wisdom
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Wisdom begins in wonder.
-Socrates
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The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms.
-Socrates
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True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.
-Socrates
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Well I am certainly wiser than this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of; but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know.
-Socrates
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The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.
-Socrates
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Women
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Once made equal to man, woman becomes his superior.
-Socrates
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Books by and about Socrates
