The children now love luxury, they have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the slaves of their households. They no longer rise when an elder enters the room, they contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up the dainties at the table, cross their legs and tyrannize over their pedagogues.

The rest of the world lives to eat, while I eat to live.

[ “Last words” :] Crito, we ought to offer a cock to Asclepius. See to it, and don’t forget.

[ On looking at an expensive shop :] How many things I can do without!

The right way to begin is to pay attention to the young, and make them just as good as possible.

Not by wisdom do they [poets] make what they compose, but by a gift of nature and an inspiration similar to that of the diviners and the oracles:

One ought not to return injustice, nor do evil to anybody in the world, no matter what one may have suffered from them.

What most counts is not to live, but to live aright.

Living or dead, to a good man there can come no evil.

In every sort of danger there are various ways of winning through, if one is ready to do and say anything whatever.