Socrates
"Having the fewest wants, I am nearest to the gods."
[Quoted in Diogenes Laertius's Lives of Eminent Philosophers]
Socrates
"I am that gadfly which God has attached to the state, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you."
[Apology (Plato)]
Socrates
"The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways -- I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows."
[Quoted in Plato's Apology]
Socrates
"The unexamined life is not worth living."
[Apology (Plato)]
Socrates
"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?"
[Quoted in Plato's Apology]
Socrates
"To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he may have the less."
[Quoted in Plato's Protagoras]
Socrates
"There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance."
[From Diogenes Laertius. Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Bk. II, sec. 31]
Socrates
"I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance."
[From Diogenes Laertius. Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Bk. II, sec. 32]
Socrates
"Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live."
[From Plutarch. How a Young Man Ought to Hear Poems.]
Socrates
"I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world."
[From Plutarch. Of Banishment.]
