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> I am a citizen not of Athens or Greece, but of the world. > How many things I can do without!! > I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance. > Two simple rules for life: Know Thyself. Take nothing in Excess. > May the outward and inward man be at one. > The beginning of wisdom is a definition of terms. > Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder. > The unexamined life is not worth living. > Beauty is a short-lived tyranny. > Let him that would move the world first move himself. > What you cannot enforce, do not command. > To choose the better pleasures one needs wisdom. > All men's souls are immortal but the souls of the righteous are immortal and divine. > The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance. > To find yourself, think for yourself. > I cannot teach anybody anything; I can only make them think. > 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. > 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. > I hold that to need nothing is divine, and the less a man needs the nearer he does approach divinity. > My advice to you is to get married; lf you find a good wife you'll be happily, if not, you'll become a philosopher. > Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for. > The shortest and best way to five with honor in the world is to be in reality what we would appear to he. > Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, or undue depression in adversity. > If a man is proud of his wealth, he should not be praised until it is known how he employs it. > The perfect human Being is all human beings put together, it is a collective; it is all of us together that make perfection. > I cannot abandon the principles which I used to hold in the past simply because this accident has happened to me. > 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. > Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions; hut those who kindly reprove thy faults. > Fellow citizens, why do you turn and scrap every stone to gather wealth and take so little care of your children to whom one day you must relinquish it all? > Virtue does not come from wealth, but>. wealth, and every other good thing which men have>. comes from virtue. > He is richest who is content with the least. He who is not contented with what he has, would not he contented with what he would like to have. Contentment is natural wealth; luxury is artificial poverty. > 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. > 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 knew 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? > The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways -I to die and you to live. Which is the better, only God knows? |
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