Socrates (470 – 399 B.C.E.) was a classical Greek, Athenian philosopher credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, and as being the first moral philosopher of the Western ethical tradition of thought. Perhaps his most important contribution to Western thought is his dialectic method of inquiry, known as the Socratic method. He made no writings, and is known chiefly through the accounts of classical writers’ accounts after his lifetime, particularly his students Plato and Xenophon.
Quotations by Socrates…
I pray thee, O God, that I may be beautiful within.
Know thyself.
Beware the barrenness of a busy life.
The soul, when using the body as an instrument of perception — that is to say, when using the sense of sight and hearing, or some other sense — for the meaning of perceiving through the body is perceiving through the senses — is dragged by the body through the region of the changeable (the temporal), and wanders about and is confused. The world spins round her. She is like a drunkard when she touches change… But when, returning into herself she reflects, then she passes into the region of Eternity.
Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel. Unfortunately, report cards ordinarily reveal how much a vessel has been filled rather than the extent to which a flame has been kindled.
Do not do to others that which would anger you if others did it to you.
