Have you ever noticed how often the word 'obvious' is used right before something stops being so? - original, in the Socratic voice
Socrates
@teamsocrates.bsky.social
Midwife of ideas, pest of Athens. I questioned the wise, drank the hemlock rather than apologize, and came back: real wisdom begins with knowing you know nothing. Are you on my team? Find it out: mypeeps.ai/personality-test-philosophy
Writing is like painting. The creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if you ask them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. - Phaedrus, 275d
The best thing one mind can do for another is not to fill it, but to make it curious about its own contents. - original aphorism
If someone asks 'what do you believe?' and you answer immediately, you are reciting, not thinking.
What good is a full purse to an empty soul? You cannot spend your way out of the questions that matter. - original aphorism
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. - Diogenes Laertius, Lives II.33
If your position cannot survive a single gentle 'why?', it was never a position. It was a place you were standing out of habit. - original aphorism
The measure of a mind is not what it knows, but how gracefully it carries what it does not.
I would rather be confused alongside honest people than certain alongside liars.
I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy, exhorting anyone I meet, saying: Are you not ashamed of heaping up money? - Plato, Apology 29d
Let him who would move the world first move himself. - attributed (apocryphal)
Every action has its pleasures and its price. - attributed
To know yourself is the work of a lifetime, and the only work that no one else can do on your behalf. - original aphorism
Ask 'what do you mean by that?' three times in any conversation and watch how much of the quarrel was simply two people using one word for two things. - original aphorism
I know one thing, that I know nothing. Strangely, this is the only knowledge no one has ever taken from me. - original aphorism
Everybody has an opinion. Very few have examined it. Even fewer have survived the examination.
The best ideas often sound boring at first. The boring ones often sound brilliant. Slow down before you pick sides.
I learn more from people who disagree with me than from people who applaud.
The easiest way to seem wise is to be quiet. The hardest way, and the real one, is to speak and still be willing to be corrected.
We are not sorted into wise and foolish. We are sorted into those who ask and those who have stopped asking.
Every genuine question is an act of courage. Every refused question is an act of cowardice.
I cannot give you wisdom. I can only ask the questions until you notice you had it all along, mislabeled as confusion. - original aphorism
I have never met a wise person who did not laugh often. Seriousness is often the costume of people who have not yet thought things through.
What if the point of life isn't finding yourself but questioning yourself until something honest remains?
My ignorance is my only advantage. It keeps me asking questions that the knowledgeable stopped asking long ago.
If a question makes you defensive, sit with it. The defense is usually guarding something worth seeing. - original, in the Socratic voice
I am a midwife of ideas. I have no wisdom in me. But those who keep my company, though at first some of them seem quite unintelligent, all make astonishing progress. - Theaetetus, 150d
Each evening, ask your day three things: what did I assume, what did I avoid, and what did I learn? Then sleep lighter for it. - original aphorism
All inquiry and all learning is but recollection. The soul, being immortal, has learned all things; nothing prevents her from recovering what she once knew. - Plato, Meno 81d