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16 years in the making, this 36,000 motivational quote search engine can identify quotations by the name of the author, keyword, gender, general ethnicity, and by phrase. It’s yours to use for free. I think it is the most diverse, deep, and far-reaching quotation search engine on values, ethics, and wisdom anywhere in the Milky Way galaxy. Enjoy! – Jason
Or have you ever noticed this about people who are said to be vicious but clever, how keen the vision of their little souls is and how sharply it distinguishes the things it is turned towards? This shows that its sight isn’t inferior but rather is forced to serve evil ends, so that the sharper it sees, the more evil it accomplishes. …it isn’t the law’s concern to make any one class in the city outstandingly happy but to contrive to spread happiness throughout the city by bringing the citizens into harmony with each other through persuasion or compulsion and by making them share with each other the benefits that each class can confer on the community. The true champion of justice, if he intends to survive even for a short time, must necessarily confine himself to private life and leave politics alone. …your well-governed city will become a possibility, for only in it will the rich truly rule – not those who are rich in gold but those who are rich in the wealth that the happy must have, namely, a good and rational life. Of course, no reasonable man ought to insist that the facts are exactly as I have described them. This isn’t, it seems, a matter of [tossing a coin], but of turning a soul from a day that is a kind of night to the true day – the ascent to what is: true philosophy. Then I, however, showed again by action, not in word only, that I did not care a whit for death, but that I did care with all my might not to do anything unjust or unholy. They who provide wealth to their children but neglect to improve them in virtue do like those who feed their horses high, but never train them to be useful. Generally, we’re all wise when advising others but we fail to see that we also err. Ought we to enquire into the truth of this, Euthyphro, or simply to accept the mere statement on our own authority and that of others? What do you say? True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us. From the time they were boys, Chaerephon had been a friend and, later, a disciple of the philosopher Socrates; indeed, both had been lampooned by Aristophanes in The Clouds as philosophic charlatans, and they shared many ideas about dialogue, disputation, and the steadfast, often impolitic pursuit of truth. Was anyone, Chaerephon asked the oracle, wiser than his old childhood friend? The oracle replied that no one exceeded the wisdom of Socrates. Although he was formally charged with corrupting young people and refusing to believe in the Athenian gods, nothing less than Socrates’ lifelong pursuit of wisdom itself was on trial. Yet his greatest crime — or, perhaps, his greatest lapse in social judgement — may well have been the deft, dispassionate inquisitions by which he established that so many of his judges and jurors were not nearly as wise as they thought. Socrates managed to say something monumental in the history of human thought: that wisdom is a human virtue, won like all virtues by hard work, in this case the hard work of experience, error, intuition, detachment, and above all, critical thinking. It is counterintuitive, adversarial, unsentimental, demythologizing, anything but conventional. Most important, Socrates’ wisdom is secular, perhaps the highest form of human excellence any mortal can hope to achieve without the help of the gods (or God). The Oracle’s [at Delphi, in Ancient Greece] puzzling declaration inspired Socrates to undertake what he called a “cycle of labors” to understand what exactly the god of Delphi had intended. “I am only too conscious that I have no claim to wisdom, great or small,” the philosopher told his accusers; “so what can he mean by asserting that I am the wisest man in the world?” As he walked away from the encounter, Socrates concluded that the politician “thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know.” With this remark, Socrates defined an essential and indeed profound aspect of true wisdom: recognizing the limits of one’s own knowledge. Countless books and endless commentary have been written about the trial of Socrates, yet one of its most astonishing features often goes unremarked. When was the last time a “trial of the century,” in any century, devoted so much public discussion to the meaning of wisdom? When was the last time a national conversation about the qualities of this elusive virtue became Topic A of its time and culture? When was the last time an entire society found itself debating the definition and importance of wisdom as if it were a matter of life and death (as it indeed was for Socrates)? Karl Jaspers famously coined the phrase “Axial Age” to define that extraordinary historical moment, roughly between 800 B.C. and 200 B.C., when civilizations in the East and West gravitated around figures that represented new modes of thought and uniquely human paths to wisdom: Socrates in ancient Greece, of course, but also Confucius in feudal China and the Buddha in the Asian subcontinent (Jesus obviously arrived on the scene a little later). Many of the essential elements we associate with wisdom were introduced as “evidence” at Socrates’ trial: the importance of humility, especially in acknowledging the limits of one’s knowledge and expertise; the importance of persistent, discomforting critical thinking and discernment (usually in the form of conversational questions) to unearth the truth; the importance of identifying and pursuing goodness; and, often underappreciated, the acceptance that true wisdom at some level is often an act of hostility against society. This Socratic ideal of the closely examined, well-lived life placed cultural markers on the definition of wisdom that would not be redeemed, either by psychology or science, for millennia. But Socrates was not alone. In roughly the same remarkable period of ancient history, in every other significant corner of the civilized world, different but equally venerable schools of philosophy, each with its own definition of wisdom, began to flower. As in the famous story of the blind men and the elephant, Socrates, Confucius, and the Buddha were grabbing and describing different parts of the same unwieldy beast, wisdom; unlike the blind men, it seems to me, they were so astute, so intuitive and supple of thought, that we can see outlines of the same animal emerging in their very separate and distinct philosophies, a point [Karl] Jaspers made at the conclusion of his short book [Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus: The Paradigmatic Individuals]. “Their concern,” he wrote, “was not mere knowledge, but a transformation in men’s thinking and inward action.” Confucius traveled widely in China in search of a job, and yet no one would hire him; when he died, historians of philosophy tell us, he felt his life had been a failure. And although the philosophy of Socrates (as filtered through the writings of Plato) has served as a template for assessing wisdom, the trial of Socrates reminds us that, even in his own time and among the hundreds of Athenian peers serving on his jury, wisdom could inspire intense social and political backlash. The quest for wisdom is a physical as well as an intellectual undertaking. It often requires changes in scenery, thrives on commerce (which often promotes the exchange of ideas), and usually involves a journey. Whether it is Socrates making the rounds of Athens to interrogate politicians and poets, or the Buddha wandering through deer parks in northeast India to spread word of his awakening, or Confucius pounding the pavement in the twilight of his life in search of employment, the early history of wisdom unfolded on the road. During a rare period of relative peace, after the defeat of Persia in 479 B.C. and prior to the start of the Peloponnesian Wars in 432 B.C., Athens enjoyed a pacific explosion of commerce, public building, the arts, and, of course, the practice of philosophy at the highest level. The City remade itself as an urban shrine to Wisdom, deified in the Parthenon, the great temple erected to honor Athena, the patroness of the city and goddess of wisdom. Philosophy assumed a central role in civic and cultural life; as Socrates told the jury at his trial, Athenians “belong to a city which is the greatest and most famous in the world for its wisdom and strength. For all its celebrated enlightenment, Athens was not so enlightened a place that its citizens could resist putting the wisest man in the world to death. Plato used Socrates’ last moments on earth (in his dialogue Phaedo) as an occasion to reiterate his belief that the pursuit of wisdom was the highest human calling — and, perhaps, a mission more easily accomplished without the distractions of bodily desires. In Plato’s account, Socrates essentially demonized and exiled emotion as a foe of wisdom, devaluing its importance, casting it as distraction and perturbation, setting it up for a philosophical reclamation project that would last more than a millennium. As distinct as these schools of thought are, it is their deeper congruences that begin to coalesce around a time-tested, culturally heterogeneous, geographically far-flung, yet surprisingly universal concept of wisdom. East or west, they all embrace social justice and insist on a code of public morality. They embrace an altruism that benefits the many. They try to dissociate individual needs and desires from the common good, and strive to master the emotions that urge immediate sensory gratification. And in their choice to be teachers, Confucius and Socrates and the Buddha, each in his own way, asserted the central primacy of sharing their accumulated body of life knowledge. That impulse would culminate in the creation, back in Greece, of the first formal academy — a school in which, it might reasonably be said, everyone majored in wisdom. One of the most dispiriting messages buried in the literature of human wisdom is the observation that there have been times during the course of human civilization when a barbarous, or merely frivolous, historical culture simply made it unwise even to appear to be wise. Socrates died in such a time, Confucius recognized the danger of such times, and Montaigne lamented the implications of such historical moments. The theme common to all these moments is the withdrawal of wisdom. And let’s face it: Who in his or her right mind would want the burden of apparent wisdom, given history’s long-running rap sheet against wise men? The role of sage, in any age, deserves hazardous-duty pay. They sentenced Socrates to death and crucified Jesus. Nobody would hire Confucius and nobody could protect Martin Luther King, Jr. They mocked Pericles and despised Churchill and assassinated Gandhi. Even Oprah’s ratings plunged (when she dared to promote the political fortunes of a relatively unknown young man named Barack Obama). If there were actually a wise person in our midst today, she would be dissected, eviscerated, macerated, and ridiculed on cable television and talk radio before we ever had a chance to figure out if she was truly wise or not… It is no coincidence that the cultural stereotype of the sage has always been the old man or the wizened woman; it is precisely that wrinkled demographic that is actuarially “closer to death,” and whose observations and advice thus have the moral authority to command our attention and respect. It is no coincidence that Socrates again and again returned to the liberating effects of death, and to his profound conviction that wisdom flourished in the curious fertilizer of impending mortality, during the thirty days that he contemplated it. Montaigne sounded many variations on the same theme. Let’s face it: Who in their right mind would want the burden of apparent wisdom, given history’s long-running rap sheet against wise men? The role of sage, in any age, deserves hazard pay. They sentenced Socrates to death and crucified Jesus. Nobody would hire Confucius, and nobody could protect Martin Luther King, Jr. They mocked Pericles and despised Churchill and assassinated Gandhi. Even Oprah’s ratings plunged when she dared to promote the political fortunes of a relatively unknown young man named Barack Obama. If there were actually a wise person in our midst today, she would be dissected, eviscerated, macerated, and ridiculed on cable television and talk radio before we ever had a chance to figure out if she were truly wise or not…. What if moral judgment, so central a notion to all schools of philosophy and the centerpiece of every major religion, is not the conscious, deliberate, reasoned discernment of right or wrong we’ve all been led to believe, but is, rather, a subterranean biological reckoning, fed by an underwater spring of hidden emotion, mischievously tickled and swayed by extraneous feelings like disgust, virtually beyond the touch of what we customarily think of as conscience? What if Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle were nothing but a bunch of two-bit, fork-tongued, post hoc rationalizers? Mandela and Gandhi were imprisoned; Confucius was unemployable; Socrates was put to death; even the closest friends of Jesus Christ, according to philosopher Karl Jaspers, viewed him as a madman. In its particular time and place, wisdom not only perturbs but often appears socially dangerous. The highest and most profitable reading, is the true knowledge and consideration of ourselves. One’s character is one’s habitual way of behaving. We all have patterns of behavior or habits, and often we are quite unaware of them. When Socrates urged us to Know thyself, he clearly was directing us to come to know our habitual ways of responding to the world around us. Rarely, if ever, do we stop to reflect on what we truly want in life, on who we are and want to become, on what difference we want to make in the world, and thus on what’s really right for us. That is the unexamined life. …You pay a big price for living such a life. What is the price you pay? What’s the cost? Socrates identified it when he stated that this form of life, the unexamined life, is not worth what you have to pay for it — that this form of life simply is not worth living. As reported by Plato in his famous Apology, Socrates was convinced that most of us approach life backwards. We give the most attention to the least important things and the least attention to the most important things. It was his firm belief that ‘wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence brings about wealth and all other public and private blessings.’ It was the state of our souls that was most important to Socrates; the inner life of each person; greatness of spirit; wisdom; inner excellence. Thales said it. Socrates repeated it. It was inscribed in marble at the most revered of Ancient Greek sites, the Oracle at Delphi: ‘Know Thyself.’ This is the simplest, most profound, most famous, and most difficult piece of advice ever given by philosophers. A good character to guide us and keep us on proper course is one of the 7 C’s of Ethical Success. Integrity and conscience – that inner-guidance system reported since the time of Socrates – should direct our paths. Bad characters can have success for a while, in a limited domain, and at the expense of what really matters, but over the long run on ethical success is always self-destructive. Is the search for wisdom worth your time? Socrates thought it was worth his life. As reported by Plato in his famous Apology, Socrates was convinced that most of us approach life backward. We give most of the attention to the least important things, and the least attention to the most important things. It was his firm belief that “wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence brings about wealth and all other public and private blessings for men.” It was the state of our souls that was important to Socrates. The inner life of each person; greatness of spirit; wisdom; inner excellence. Surely since pleasure is not the way: that road is a circle: as Socrates phrased the coarser Epicurean idea, we scratch that we may itch, and itch that we may scratch. Surely since pleasure is not the way: that road is a circle: as Socrates phrased the coarser Epicurean idea, we scratch that we may itch, and itch that we may scratch. …the ethic of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, denies the universal applicability of either the feminine or the masculine virtues; considers that only the informed and mature mind can judge, according to diverse circumstance, when love should rule, and when power; identifies virtue, therefore, with intelligence; and advocates a varying mixture of aristocracy and democracy in government. How many of the world’s ills stem from the absolute conviction on someone’s part that he’s right? This is humanity’s most dangerous disease—it produces the Torquemadas and Hitlers and the indignant gentleman who deliberately runs into you because he is sure he has the right of way. These words are words that call for the remedy Socrates used to master his own soul—a little unsureness.
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The ideals that have lighted my way have been kindness, beauty, and truth.
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