Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that. How did i...t become so easy?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You who have condemned me, I know your kind. Your forebears poisoned Socrates, burned Joan of Arc, hanged, tortured all those whos...e only offense was to bring light into darkness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Pythagoras, Locke, Socrates--but pages Might be filled up, as vainly as before,... With the sad usage of all sorts of sages, Who in his life-time, each was deemed a bore! The loftiest minds outrun their tardy ages.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Socrates drinking the hemlock, And Jesus on the rood;... And millions who, humble and nameless, The straight, hard pathway plod-- Some call it Consecration, And others call it God.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every human being has, like Socrates, an attendant spirit; and wise are they who obey its signals. If it does not always tell us w...hat to do, it always cautions us what not to do.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As an example of just how useless these philosophers are for any practice in life there is Socrates himself, the one and only wise... man, according to the Delphic Oracle. Whenever he tried to do anything in public he had to break off amid general laughter. While he was philosophizing about clouds and ideas, measuring a flea's foot and marveling at a midge's humming, he learned nothing about the affairs of ordinary life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[F]or as Socrates says that a wise man is a citizen of the world, so I thought that a wise woman was equally at liberty to range t...hrough every station or degree of men, to fix her choice wherever she pleased.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 So...crates.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Even of old the Christian world, so bitterly antagonistic to any ideas not specifically contained in their creeds and dogmas, made... an exception in Socrates' case. They recognized his likeness to Christ. He was the example that a soul could be Christlike not through grace, but by nature. Erasmus said, "Holy Socrates, pray for us." To know him is a help to knowing Christ, and it is not hard to know him. We can see him quite clearly. Plato who drew his portrait, could not, of course, keep himself out of it, any more than Christ's recorders could, but at least magic did not dog Plato's footsteps as it did everyone's footsteps when the Gospels were written. In the fourth century B.C. Greeks had no leaning to marvels. Also in the centuries that followed no one founded a church on Socrates and built up around him a theology and hung creeds and ceremonials upon him. To see what he was we do not have to brush anything away except a bit of Plato. We can use him as a stepping stone to Christ, a first aid in realizing what Christ was.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »