Socrates - A Man for Our Times

"My voice and my reason agreed against politics." p. 79 "Socrates occupied himself with ethics, and most of all with nature as a whole." Aristotle Wisdom consists in knowing one's own ignorance. p.83 Socrates' "endless ironizing and jesting." Socrates possessed the ability to slip deftly and almost imperceptibly from seriousness to laughter and back again --the essence of sophisticated communication.p87 "I hope I never ridicule what is wise and good. But follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies do divert me. I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can." Jane Austen -- Pride and Prejudice How Socrates' mind worked: courtesy, patience, sensitivity, and calmness, lighthearted flexibility and high seriousness. p.88 Two fundamentally distinct kinds of philosophers: first,those who tell you what to think, and second, those who tell you how to think. Socrates belongs to the second group. He wants to show that on almost any topic...the received opinion is nearly always faulty and often wholly wrong. p.91 The object is teaching the people to whom he is talking how to think and, not least, how to think for themselves. p. 92 "A healthy body is the greatest of blessings." "Leisure is the most valuable of possessions." "Nothing is to be said in favor of riches and high birth, which are easy roads to evil." " ...we know from the business of horse training that owners often like to pick a difficult animal, which poses more interesting problems." "You cannot step twice into the same river." Heraclitus The Obscure Socrates born in Athens, Greece in 470 BC. Ezra, priest and prophet, the leading intellectual among the exiled Jewish community in Persia, born in 491 B.C.(5th or 4th of B.C.E.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezra Confucius in Shantung, China in 551 B.C. Socrates - A Man for Our Times by Paul Johnson (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2011)