Socrates Quotes: The Real Ones, Where They Come From, and the Fakes
In short. Socrates wrote nothing, so every quote comes from Plato, Xenophon or later writers. The genuine lines with exact references, and the popular fakes exposed.
Socrates never wrote a word. Every “Socrates quote” is something another person put in his mouth: mostly Plato, who made him the hero of his dialogues; Xenophon, a soldier and gentleman farmer who remembered a more practical Socrates; Aristophanes, who mocked him on stage in the Clouds; and writers centuries later, above all Diogenes Laertius, whose Lives of the Eminent Philosophers dates from around the third century AD. The reasons he left nothing behind are covered in our piece on whether Socrates wrote anything.
So a Socrates quote is always a report, and the useful question is: whose report, and where? This page answers that for the lines people actually search for. The genuine quotes come first, each with a precise reference (a Stephanus number for Plato, which works in any edition or translation). Then come the fakes and near-misses, with their real origins where those are known. All translations are my own and kept short.
Socrates quotes at a glance
| Quote | Real? | Source |
|---|---|---|
| “The unexamined life is not worth living” | Yes | Plato, Apology 38a |
| “I know that I know nothing” | Compressed | Plato, Apology 21d |
| The gadfly of Athens | Yes | Plato, Apology 30e |
| Care for your soul before your wealth | Yes | Plato, Apology 29d–30b |
| “No evil can happen to a good man” | Yes | Plato, Apology 41d |
| “I to die, and you to live” | Yes | Plato, Apology 42a |
| Better to suffer wrong than to do it | Yes | Plato, Gorgias 469c |
| Never return wrong for wrong | Yes | Plato, Crito 49b–c |
| No one does wrong willingly | Yes | Plato, Protagoras 345d–e; Meno 77b–78b |
| Philosophy is practice for dying | Yes | Plato, Phaedo 64a |
| “We owe a cock to Asclepius” | Yes | Plato, Phaedo 118a |
| “Wisdom begins in wonder” | Compressed | Plato, Theaetetus 155d |
| “Know thyself” | Adopted, not coined | Delphic maxim; Plato, Phaedrus 229e–230a |
| “Make me beautiful within” | Yes | Plato, Phaedrus 279b–c |
| To need nothing is divine | Yes | Xenophon, Memorabilia I.6.10 |
| “How many things I can do without!” | Late report | Diogenes Laertius II.25 |
| “The secret of change is to focus all of your energy…” | No | Dan Millman, 1980 novel |
| “Education is the kindling of a flame…” | No | Paraphrase of Plutarch |
| “Strong minds discuss ideas…” | No | Modern, origin unclear |
| “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle” | No | Ian Maclaren, 1890s |
| “I cannot teach anybody anything…” | No | Modern |
| “To find yourself, think for yourself” | No | No known source |
| “The children now love luxury…” | No | Kenneth Freeman, 1907 |
| “By all means marry…” | Embellished | Built on Diogenes Laertius II.33 |
| “Speak, that I may see you” | Very late report | Apuleius, Florida 2 |
“The unexamined life is not worth living”
Status: genuine. This is the most quoted line in all of Socratic literature, and it is exactly where people say it is. Socrates has just been found guilty. He is asked, in effect, whether he could go into exile and live quietly without philosophising. His answer:
The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.
Plato, Apology 38a · own translation
It is not a wellness slogan about self-reflection. It is a man explaining, at the cost of his life, why a silenced version of himself would not really be living. The whole scene is covered in our guide to the Apology.
“I know that I know nothing”
Status: genuine in substance, compressed in wording. The famous slogan does not occur in Plato. What Socrates says at Apology 21d is subtler: that neither he nor the politician he questioned knows anything fine and good, but the politician thinks he knows and Socrates does not. The wisdom is in not mistaking ignorance for knowledge. We explain the difference on the Plato quotes page and at full length in what Socrates meant by “I know that I know nothing”.
“I am a gadfly”
Status: genuine. Apology 30e. Socrates tells the jury that the god has attached him to Athens as a gadfly is attached to a large, well-bred horse that has grown sluggish because of its size and needs to be stung awake. He adds that a sleepy horse is tempted to swat the fly dead. The mix of mockery and seriousness in lines like this is what people mean by Socratic irony.
“Are you not ashamed to care for money, and not for your soul?”
Status: genuine. Apology 29d–30b. This is the closest thing Socrates has to a mission statement. He asks his fellow citizens whether they are not ashamed to take care over wealth, reputation and honour while giving no thought to wisdom, truth and the best possible state of their soul. Then he reverses the usual order of things:
Virtue does not come from wealth; rather, from virtue come wealth and every other good for human beings.
Plato, Apology 30b · own translation
“Soul” here (psychē) means something close to the self or character, not only a religious afterlife. The point is ethical: look after what kind of person you are first.
“No evil can happen to a good man, in life or in death”
Status: genuine. Apology 41d. After the death sentence, Socrates tells the jurors who voted to acquit him to be of good hope about death, and to hold to one truth: that nothing bad can happen to a good man, living or dead, and that the gods do not neglect his affairs. The claim only makes sense on Socrates’ view of what “bad” means. His accusers can kill him, but they cannot make him worse, and for Socrates being made worse is the only real harm.
“Now it is time to go, I to die and you to live”
Status: genuine. These are the last words of the Apology, and among the finest lines Plato ever wrote:
But now it is time to go away, I to die and you to live. Which of us goes to the better thing is unclear to everyone except the god.
Plato, Apology 42a · own translation
Notice the ending. Even here Socrates refuses to claim knowledge he does not have. He has just argued that death is either a dreamless sleep or a journey to good company, and still he will not say for certain that he has the better deal.
“It is better to suffer wrong than to do it”
Status: genuine. Gorgias 469c. Polus asks Socrates whether he would rather suffer injustice than commit it. Socrates replies that he would want neither, but if he had to choose, he would choose to suffer it. Polus finds this laughable, and so did most Athenians. Callicles later dismisses it as a morality for weaklings.
“One must never return wrong for wrong”
Status: genuine. Crito 49b–c. In prison, with escape arranged, Socrates insists that one must never do wrong, and so never do wrong in return or harm anyone, whatever one has suffered from them. He admits that few people will ever agree. This is one reason he refuses to break out of jail.
“No one does wrong willingly”
Status: genuine as a doctrine; the slogan is a summary. In the Protagoras (345d–e), Socrates says no wise man believes that any human being does wrong willingly. In the Meno (77b–78b), he argues that nobody wants what is bad once they see it as bad; people who pursue bad things mistake them for good. This is the famous Socratic paradox: all wrongdoing is a kind of ignorance. We unpack it in what is the Socratic paradox.
“Philosophy is practice for dying”
Status: genuine. Phaedo 64a. On his last day, Socrates tells his friends that those who practise philosophy correctly are practising nothing other than dying and being dead. He means that philosophy trains the soul to detach itself from the body’s distractions, which is what death completes. The line returns at 67e: true philosophers “practise dying”. The Phaedo carries much of Plato’s own metaphysics, so this Socrates may be more Platonic than historical.
“Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius”
Status: genuine. Phaedo 118a. His last words, spoken after the hemlock has reached his chest:
Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Pay it, and do not forget.
Plato, Phaedo 118a · own translation
Asclepius was the god of healing, and people offered him a rooster after a cure. Readers have argued for two thousand years about whether Socrates means that death is a cure for life, or is simply settling a real debt. Plato, who says he was ill that day, was not in the room. The scene is examined in the death of Socrates.
“Wisdom begins in wonder”
Status: genuine, compressed. The popular four-word version is not a mistranslation so much as a shortening. At Theaetetus 155d, after the young Theaetetus admits that Socrates’ puzzles make him dizzy, Socrates tells him:
This feeling, wonder, belongs above all to the philosopher. Philosophy has no other beginning than this.
Plato, Theaetetus 155d · own translation
The original is about philosophy rather than “wisdom”, and the wonder in question is the uncomfortable kind: the vertigo of realising you do not understand something you took for granted.
“Know thyself”
Status: genuine as something Socrates took up; not his invention. “Know thyself” (gnōthi seauton) was inscribed at Apollo’s temple at Delphi before Socrates was born. What Plato gives him is a personal response to it. At Phaedrus 229e–230a, asked about myths, Socrates says he has no time for them because he is not yet able, as the Delphic inscription commands, to know himself, and it seems absurd to investigate other things while still ignorant of that. So quote the maxim as Delphic, and the use of it as Socratic.
“Make me beautiful within”
Status: genuine. Phaedrus 279b–c. The dialogue ends with Socrates praying to Pan and the local gods of the riverbank: grant that I become beautiful within, that my outward things be at peace with my inner ones, that I count the wise man rich, and that I have only as much gold as a moderate person could carry. The famously ugly Socrates cared a great deal about beauty, just not the visible kind.
“To need nothing is divine”
Status: genuine (Xenophon). Memorabilia I.6.10. The sophist Antiphon mocks Socrates for his poor food, single cloak and bare feet. Socrates answers that Antiphon seems to think happiness is luxury and expense, whereas he thinks that to need nothing is divine, and to need as little as possible is nearest to the divine. This is Xenophon’s Socrates: less of a paradox-monger, more of a model of self-control. It is good evidence that the frugality was real and not a Platonic invention.
“How many things I can do without!”
Status: genuine as a later report. Diogenes Laertius II.25 says that Socrates, looking at the mass of goods on sale in the market, used to say to himself: “How many things I have no need of!” Diogenes wrote roughly six centuries later, drawing on older collections of anecdotes, so treat this as tradition rather than testimony. It fits Xenophon’s portrait closely, which is some reassurance. The same book (II.31) reports his saying that there is one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance; that too is a later summary, not a sentence from Plato.
“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new”
Status: misattributed. Probably the most shared fake Socrates quote in the world. It comes from Dan Millman’s 1980 novel Way of the Peaceful Warrior, in which a gas-station attendant and spiritual mentor is nicknamed “Socrates”. The line belongs to that character. Nothing like it appears in any ancient source, and the language of “energy” and “building the new” is plainly modern self-help.
“Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel”
Status: misattributed. The idea is ancient, but the author is Plutarch, writing around 100 AD, not Socrates. In his essay On Listening to Lectures (48c) Plutarch says the mind does not need filling like a bottle; it needs kindling, like wood, so that it catches fire with a love of inquiry. The snappy English version is a modern paraphrase. If you want something genuinely Platonic in the same spirit, Republic 518b–d says education is not putting sight into blind eyes but turning the whole soul toward the light.
“Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people”
Status: misattributed. There is no trace of this in Plato, Xenophon or any ancient writer. It is modern, and it is also often credited to Eleanor Roosevelt, though no one has found it in her writings either. Versions of the thought circulate from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but its first author is genuinely uncertain.
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle”
Status: misattributed. Usually traced to Ian Maclaren, the pen name of the Scottish minister John Watson, in the 1890s, in a form close to “be pitiful, for every man is fighting a hard battle”. It gets pinned on Plato as well as Socrates; see the Plato quotes page. No ancient source contains it.
“I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think”
Status: misattributed. No ancient text says this. It is a modern summary of Socrates’ method, and a loose one. The authentic image is the midwife in the Theaetetus (150c–d): Socrates says he is barren of wisdom himself but can help others bring their own ideas to birth, and then test whether the offspring is real or a phantom.
“To find yourself, think for yourself”
Status: misattributed. I can find no source for this in any ancient author, and no reliable modern origin either. It circulates only on quote sites and posters. Socrates’ own route to self-knowledge ran through questioning other people, not thinking alone.
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority…”
Status: misattributed. This long complaint about disrespectful youth was written in 1907 by Kenneth John Freeman, a Cambridge student, in a dissertation later published as Schools of Hellas. Freeman was summarising the kinds of complaints ancient Greeks made about the young, in his own words. Later writers lifted his paragraph and put it in Socrates’ mouth, and the quotation marks stuck. The same fake is pinned on Plato; we trace it in the Plato quotes article linked above.
“By all means marry: if you get a good wife, you’ll be happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher”
Status: embellished. There is a real ancient seed. Diogenes Laertius (II.33) reports that when someone asked Socrates whether to marry or not, he replied that whichever he did, he would regret it. The polished joke about becoming a philosopher, with its nod to the bad-tempered Xanthippe of later legend, is a modern elaboration; I have not found it in any ancient text. Quote the Diogenes version instead.
“Speak, that I may see you”
Status: very late report, not in Plato or Xenophon. This one is often dismissed as fake, but it has an ancient source of sorts: the Roman writer Apuleius, in the second century AD (Florida 2), tells a story of Socrates saying it to a handsome young man who stood silent. It appears in none of the early witnesses, and Apuleius was writing more than five hundred years after Socrates’ death, so it is an anecdote, not evidence of what Socrates said.
How to check a Socrates quote
- Ask who reported it. Every real Socrates quote has an author other than Socrates. If the answer is “Plato”, there should be a dialogue and a Stephanus number (Apology 38a). If it is Xenophon, a book and chapter (Memorabilia I.6.10). If nobody can say, it is almost certainly modern.
- Remember the portraits differ. Plato’s Socrates, Xenophon’s Socrates and Aristophanes’ stage Socrates are three different figures. Even the genuine quotes are literature, and scholars still argue about which of them reflect the historical man.
- Distrust the uplifting ones. The real Socrates rarely reassures anyone. His famous lines are about ignorance, justice, the soul and death. If a quote sounds like it belongs on a coffee mug, check it twice.
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