I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing,
and that is that I know nothing.
- Socrates
Related topics: Wisdom
Know thyself.
- Socrates (inscribed on the ancient Greek temple at Delphi) 
Beware the barrenness of a busy life.
- Socrates
He is richest who is content with the least,
for content is the wealth of nature.
- Socrates
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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
The envious person grows lean
with the fatness of their neighbor.
- Socrates
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
The greatest way to live with honor in this world
is to be what we pretend to be.
- Socrates
True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.
- Socrates
Wisdom begins in wonder.
- Socrates
An honest man is always a child.
- Socrates
The shortest and surest way to
live with honor in the world,
is to be in reality
what we would appear to be.
- Socrates
True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize
how little we understand about life,
ourselves, and the world around us.
- Socrates
Worthless people live only to eat and drink;
people of worth eat and drink only to live.
- Socrates
He is richest who is content with the least.
- Socrates
Let him that would move the world first move himself.
- Socrates
I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.
- Socrates
It is not living that matters, but living rightly.
- Socrates
The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor
to be what you desire to appear.
- Socrates
As for me, all I know is that I know nothing.
- Socrates
Be as you wish to seem.
- Socrates
The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.
- Socrates
I know that I am intelligent,
because I know that I know nothing.
- Socrates
I cannot teach anybody anything.
I can only make them think.
- Socrates
Not life, but good life,
is to be chiefly valued.
- Socrates
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
The unexamined life is not worth living.
- Socrates
Once made equal to man, woman becomes his superior.
- Socrates
As to marriage or celibacy, let a man
take which course he will,
he will be sure to repent.
- Socrates
He is a man of courage who does not run away,
but remains at his post and fights against the enemy.
- Socrates
Be slow to fall into friendship;
but when thou art in, continue firm and constant.
- Socrates
If a man is proud of his wealth,
he should not be praised until it is known how he employs it.
- Socrates
Our prayers should be for blessings in general,
for God knows best what is good for us.
- Socrates
From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.
- Socrates
By all means marry.
If you get a good wife, you'll be happy.
If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher
and that is a good thing for any man.
- Socrates
Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.
- Socrates
If all misfortunes were laid in one common heap
whence everyone must take an equal portion,
most people would be contented to take their own and depart.
- Socrates
Envy is the ulcer of the soul.
- 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.
- Socrates
False words are not only evil in themselves,
but they infect the soul with evil.
- Socrates
All men's souls are immortal,
but the souls of the righteous are immortal and divine.
- Socrates
The end of life is to be like God,
and the soul following God will be like Him.
- Socrates
Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.
- Socrates
Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings,
so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.
- Socrates
Beauty is the bait which with delight
allures man to enlarge his kind.
- Socrates
My advice to you is get married:
if you find a good wife you'll be happy;
if not, you'll become a philosopher.
- Socrates
I only wish that ordinary people
had an unlimited capacity for doing harm;
then they might have an unlimited power for doing good.
- Socrates
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
The poets are only the interpreters of the Gods.
- Socrates
I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live.
- Socrates
It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom.
It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest
might weaken and the wisest might err.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi
Peace and friendship with all mankind is our wisest policy,
and I wish we may be permitted to pursue it.
- Thomas Jefferson
Talent is God-given; be humble.
Fame is man-given; be thankful.
Conceit is self-given; be careful.
- John Wooden
No man stands so tall as when he stoops to help a child.
- Anonymous (often attributed to Abraham Lincoln)
Every child comes with the message
that God is not yet discouraged of man.
- Rabindranath Tagore
All things share the same breath -
the beast, the tree, the man...
the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports.
- Chief Seattle (attributed)
Adventure is not outside man; it is within.
- George Eliot
Nearly all men can stand adversity,
but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
- Abraham Lincoln
The full measure of a man is
not to be found in the man himself,
but in the colors and textures that
come alive in others because of him.
- Albert Schweitzer
Circumstance does not make the man: it reveals him to himself.
- James Allen
The wise man in the storm prays God,
not for safety from danger,
but for deliverance from fear.
It is the storm within which endangers him,
not the storm without.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
The wise man does not lay up his own treasures.
The more he gives to others, the more he has for his own.
- Lao Tzu
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.
Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
- Oscar Wilde
Two things a man should never be angry at:
what he can help,
and what he cannot help.
- Thomas Fuller
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men
who walked through the huts comforting others,
giving away their last piece of bread...
They offer sufficient proof that everything
can be taken from a man but one thing:
to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances,
to choose one's own way.
- Viktor E. Frankl
The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was:
"If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?"
But... the good Samaritan reversed the question:
"If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?"
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
If a man is called to be a street sweeper,
he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted,
or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry.
He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts
of heaven and earth will pause to say,
here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
The man who goes alone can start today;
but he who travels with another
must wait till that other is ready.
- Henry David Thoreau
As soon as man does not take his existence for granted,
but beholds it as something
unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.
- Albert Schweitzer
A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.
- John F. Kennedy
Is the babe young? When I behold it,
it seems more venerable than the oldest man.
- Henry David Thoreau
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- Jonathan Lockwood Huie
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