Human condition Quote by William B. Irvine

“study of human nature was in a sorry state. While he had reservations about the ancient philosophers for depending ‘more on Invention than Experience’,…

— David Hume

Socrates was the first to call philosophy down from the heavens and to place it in cities, and even to introduce it into homes…

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

Socrates had no system to teach. Throughout, his philosophy was a spiritual exercise, an invitation to a new way of life, active reflection, and…

— Pierre Hadot

So Socrates was a kind of gadfly. He was a sort of philosophical urban gorilla hanging around in the middle of Athens, asking these…

— Rebecca Goldstein

“To Socrates, an individual’s actions were directly related to his intelligence and ignorance. He believed people should develop their self, rather than concentrate on…

— Paul Kleinman

We should realize that, if [Socrates] demanded that the wisest men should rule, he clearly stressed that he did not mean the learned men;…

— Anonymous

The great virtue, I think, of studying Aristotle - and, more importantly, taking him seriously as a possible teacher - is that he presents…

— David Roochnik

Socrates was a philosopher. He went around pointing out errors in the way things were done. They fed him hemlock.

— Gil Amelio

Since Socrates and Plato first speculated on the nature of the human mind, serious thinkers through the ages - from Aristotle to Descartes, from…

— Eric Kandel

As a Roman philosopher, Cicero, said of him a few hundred years later, Socrates 'called philosophy down from the sky and established her in…

— Jostein Gaarder

Socrates' way of life is the consequence of his recognition that we can know what it is that we do not know about the…

— Allan Bloom

“We know so little about Socrates but somehow we still remember he existed; more amazing yet, is how the meaning of ethics has completely…

— Alejandro C. Estrada