The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.
¶ (Attributed)
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Socrates (c.470-399 BC) Greek philosopher
If the whole world depends on today's youth, I can't see the world lasting another 100 years.
¶ (Attributed)
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.
¶ (Attributed)
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.
¶ (Attributed)
If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap, whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be content to take their own and depart.
¶ (Attributed)
For to fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise without really being wise, for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For no one knows whether death may not be the greatest good that can happen to man. But men fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils.
¶ (Attributed)
The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.
¶ (Attributed)
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.
¶ (Spurious)
Originally cited as attributed to Socrates by Plato by Patty & Johnson, Personality and Adjustment (1953). Refuted to either Socrates or Plato in Forbes (15 Apr 1966)
A man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong -- acting the part of a good man or a bad.
¶ Apology (Plato) (399 BC)
Alt. trans.: "Thou doest wrong to think that a man of any use at all is to weigh the risk of life or death, and not to consider one thing only, whether when he acts he does the right thing or the wrong, performs the deeds of a good man or a bad." (Full text)
Speech is a kind of action.
¶ In Plato's Cratylus (387 BC)
tr. B. Jowett (1894)
For the partisan, when he is engaged in a dispute, cares nothing about the rights of the question, but is anxious only to convince his hearers of his own assertions.
¶ In Plato's Phaedo, Part IV (360 BC)
Source text
The shortest and surest way to live with honour 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 of them.
¶ Quoted in Memorabilia of Socrates by Xenophon, trans. Edward Bysshe (1722)
Full text.
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.
¶ in Plato's Apology, XIX
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