Socrates Quotes

. . . (today) we accept, indeed regard as a platitude, an idea that Aristotle rejected, that someone can have one virtue while lacking others . For Aristotle, as for Socrates, practical reason required the dispositions of action and feeling to be harmonized; if any disposition was properly to count as a virtue, it had to be part of a rational structure that included all the virtues. This is quite different from our assumption (in the modern world) that these kinds of virtuous disposition are enough like other psychological characteristics to explain how one person can, so to speak, do better in one area than another. . . . (today) we do not believe in the unity of the virtues.

I will admit, like Socrates and Aristotle and Plato and some other philosophers, that there are instances where the death penalty would seem appropriate.

A Socrates in every classroom.

Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that. How did it become so easy?

Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life`s true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.

In New York one lives in the moment rather more than Socrates advised, so that at a party or alone in your room it will always be difficult to guess at the long term worth of anything.