"Socratic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... long time suspected that I had been expending my vigor and breath elsewhere. "No! No! Darling," I replied, "my love for you has always been the same, but reason prevails now over love and wantonness.") "And for the Socratic continence of your love, I thank you in his name," (he replied sarcastically,) "Alcibiades was never more spotless when he ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... Bible, touched the sore-hearted unbelief of the man no nearer than the clangour of negro kettles affects the eclipse of the sun. Falconer stood watching his opportunity. Nor was the eager disputant long in affording him one. Socratic fashion, Falconer asked him a question, and was answered; followed it with another, which, after a little hesitation, was likewise answered; then asked a third, the ready answer to which involved such a flagrant contradiction of the first, ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... instruction, the rules determining the selection of each and the methods of their construction not being preached in lectures, ex Cathedra, but evolved by a patient questioning of nature, by experiment and the Socratic method of inquiry. Exercise of the limbs under the direction of a skilled instructor, so that all the muscles of the body may be duly trained, and a healthy body built up to support a healthy mind. The kinds of recreation to be selected, whether bull-baiting, cock-fighting, rat-catching ...
— The Philosophy of Teaching - The Teacher, The Pupil, The School • Nathaniel Sands
... I was intent on improving my language, I met with an English Grammar (I think it was Greenwood's), at the end of which there were two little sketches of the arts of rhetoric and logic, the latter "finishing with a specimen of a dispute in the Socratic method; and soon after I procured Xenophon's Memorable Things of Socrates, wherein there are many instances of the same method. I was charmed with it, adopted it, dropt my abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation, and put on the humble ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... troubles to a friend whom we shall call Socratic. And Socratic helps them out for a consideration. His time is valuable and he bought his wisdom ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... Epicurean tenets, have thought that Jerome referred to Q. Cicero the orator's brother, but for this there is no authority. The poem is entitled De Rerum Natura, an equivalent for the Greek peri physeos, the usual title of the pre-Socratic philosophers' works. The form, viz. a poem in heroic hexameters, containing a carefully reasoned exposition, in which regard was had above all to the claims of the subject-matter, was borrowed from the Sicilian thinker Empedocles [51] (460 B.C.). ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... of their duties, and useful to families, to their fatherland, and to humanity." [5] We are therefore in the ambit of secondary schools. The lesson we cite is a practical application of the principle of giving lessons by means of interrogation (Socratic method), and deals with a ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... which he makes are only elicited from him by the dialectic of Socrates. He has not yet experienced the influence of the Sophists like Glaucon and Adeimantus, nor is he sensible of the necessity of refuting them; he belongs to the pre-Socratic or pre-dialectical age. He is incapable of arguing, and is bewildered by Socrates to such a degree that he does not know what he is saying. He is made to admit that justice is a thief, and that the virtues follow the analogy of the arts. From his brother Lysias (contra ...
— The Republic • Plato
... speeches is at times too apparent. But nothing, upon the whole, can be finer than the address with which this is done; the changes of scene and the turns of the dialogue are managed with admirable felicity; there is an exquisite fitness and Socratic point in all the evolutions of the argument, which we feel even now when we see so clearly behind the scenes, and know that Molinist and New Thomist must have had a good deal more to say for themselves. We have only to imagine the atmosphere of the Sorbonne, or the wider social atmosphere ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... was like other people's; he mounted no high horse; he was just a man and a citizen. He indulged in no Socratic irony. But his discourse was full of Attic grace; those who heard it went away neither disgusted by servility, nor repelled by ill-tempered censure, but on the contrary lifted out of themselves by charity, and encouraged to ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... (see his character, Annals, b. xvi. s. 18), was, amidst all his dissipation, a man of learning, and, at intervals, of deep reflection. He knew the value of true philosophy, and, therefore, directs the young orator to the Socratic school, and to that plan of education which we have before us in the present Dialogue. He bids his scholar begin with Homer, and there drink deep of the Pierian spring: after that, he recommends the moral system; and, when his mind is thus enlarged, he allows him ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... discussed; and Robert was at least as ready to learn from the practical workers about him as to teach. But in general these informal talks and debates became the supplement of the Sunday lectures. Here he met Andrews and the Secularist crew face to face; here he grappled in Socratic fashion with objections and difficulties, throwing into the task all his charm and all his knowledge, a man at once of no pretensions and of unfailing natural dignity. Nothing, so far, had served his cause and his influence so well as these moments of free discursive ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Imperfection of contemporaneous physical science The Ionian philosophers Socrates bases truth on consciousness Uncertainty of physical inquiries in his day Superiority of moral truth Happiness, Virtue, Knowledge,—the Socratic trinity The "daemon" of Socrates His idea of God and Immortality Socrates a witness and agent of God Socrates compared with Buddha and Marcus Aurelius His resemblance to Christ in life and teachings Unjust charges ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... the meaning of his speech. Through his own questions he sought to arouse the questioning spirit, which should weigh the import of words, and be satisfied with nothing short of a definite and consistent judgment. In the Platonic dialogues the Socratic method obtains a place in literature. In the "Theaetetus," which is, perhaps, the greatest of all epistemological treatises, Socrates is represented as likening his vocation to that ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... the weapons essential to victory. The evils that afflict humanity are meted out with a marvellously accurate reference to the idiosyncrasies of character; and no weight is imposed which cannot by heroic effort be sustained. The Socratic belief that if all misfortunes were laid in a heap, whence every man and woman must draw an equal portion, each would select the burden temporarily laid down and walk away comforted, was merely an adumbration of the sublimer truth, "As thy day, so ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... a man who got a living by spiritually intuiting oil. "Something told him," some Socratic demon or inner impulse, that there was "ile" here or there, deep under the earth. To pilot to this "ile" of beauty he was paid high fees. One of my new friends avowed his intention of at once employing this ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... exasperates some of her biographers, was largely economical and ironical. Her narrow cell is reported to have often resounded with peals of laughter to the scandal of some of her sisters. In support of all that, I have marked a score of Socratic passages in Woodhead, and Dalton, and Lewis, and Father Coleridge, and Mrs. Cunninghame Graham. They are very delicious passages and very tempting. But were they once begun there would be no end to them. You will believe Froude, for he is an admitted judge in all ...
— Santa Teresa - an Appreciation: with some of the best passages of the Saint's Writings • Alexander Whyte
... first speech as a general; a fine one; a spirit of athleticism breathes through it. Cf. Memorabilia for a similar rationalisation of virtuous self-restraint (e.g. Mem., Bk. I. c. 5, 6; Bk. III. c. 8). Paleyan somewhat, perhaps Socratic, not devoid of common sense. What is the end and aim of our training? Not only for an earthly aim, but for a high spiritual reward, ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... thought this indifference of his very strange. But savages are strange beings; at times you do not know exactly how to take them. At first they are overawing; their calm self-collectedness of simplicity seems a Socratic wisdom. I had noticed also that Queequeg never consorted at all, or but very little, with the other seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever; appeared to have no desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances. ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... means a necessity of life. Whether Socrates got as much happiness out of life as Wesley is an unanswerable question; but a nation of Socrateses would be much safer and happier than a nation of Wesleys; and its individuals would be higher in the evolutionary scale. At all events it is in the Socratic man and not in the Wesleyan that ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... put up its fists to the Mayor, and the Mayor proposed a public hearing, with the Council in attendance. At this juncture the Reform League sent a questionnaire to each Councillor, and to each member of the Association. The phraseology was Socratic (it was the product of Mr. Mix's genius) and if any one answered Yes, he was snared: if he said No, he was ambushed, and if he said nothing he was cooked. It reminded the Mayor of the man who claimed that in ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... for then we ourselves would be at the beck and call of every external excitation, desire, passion, or temptation. Our salvation consists in self-determination, so we shall avoid licence but preserve Freedom. We can only repeat the Socratic maxim—"Know thyself"—and resolve to take to heart the appeal of ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... survey of things sub specie eternitatis, the reception of a kind of absolute and independent knowledge [28] (independent, that is, of time and position, the accidents and peculiar point of view of the receiver) Plato is consciously under the influence of another great master of the Pre- Socratic thought, Parmenides, the centre of the ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... The Socratic mode of reasoning is frequently practised upon children. People arrange questions artfully, so as to bring them to whatever conclusion they please. In this mode of reasoning, much depends upon getting the first move; the child has very little chance of having it, ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... his name, in the same generous bestowal, another—inferior, indeed, in brilliance, but which represents a more consistent and a more useful life. We allude to Dr. Dick, of Broughty Ferry, a gentleman who has done more than any living author to popularize science—to accomplish the Socratic design of bringing down philosophy to earth—who has never ceased, at the same time, to exhale moral and religious feeling, as a fine incense, from the researches and experiments of science to the Eternal ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... while Plato developed it metaphysically in connexion with his doctrine of "Ideas" as the art of analysing ideas in themselves and in relation to the ultimate idea of the Good (Repub. vii.). The special function of the so-called "Socratic dialectic" was to show the inadequacy of popular beliefs. Aristotle himself used "dialectic," as opposed to "science," for that department of mental activity which examines the presuppositions lying at the back of all the particular sciences. Each particular science has its own subject matter ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... 'the hope and the faith that in course of time we shall see our way from the constituents of the protoplasm to its properties,' i.e. from carbonic acid, water, and ammonia to that mysterious thing which we call vitality or life—from the molecular motion of the brain to Socratic wisdom, Shakespearean genius, and Christian ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... Maestro would step to the window and look into the hut from which came this Socratic dialogue. And on this wall-less platform which looked much like a primitive stage, a singular action was unrolling itself in the smoky glimmer of a two-cent lamp. The Third Assistant was not there at all; but Isidro was the Third Assistant. ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... "L'Orient," were discussing one of those questions which Bonaparte often propounded, in order that, as arbiter in this contest of wits, he might gauge their mental powers. Mental dexterity, rather than the Socratic pursuit after truth, was the aim of their dialectic; but on one occasion, when religion was being discussed, Bonaparte sounded a deeper note: looking up into the midnight vault of sky, he said to the philosophizing atheists: ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... way or other general terms supply the common bond. The recognition of this fact was one of the great results of the Socratic discussion. This explains the immense importance which Socrates naturally attached to the criticism of general and ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... consequence; it is the infallible result of his view of science and its problem, and is as original as that is. Whoever accepts Bacon's doctrine of cause must accept at the same time his theory of the way in which the cause may be sifted out from among the phenomena. It is evident that the Socratic search for the essence by an analysis of instances—an induction ending in a definition—has a strong resemblance ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... have compiled the scholae, as the Greeks call them, of five days, in as many books. We proceeded in this manner: when he who had proposed the subject for discussion had said what he thought proper, I spoke against him; for this is, you know, the old and Socratic method of arguing against another's opinion; for Socrates thought that thus the truth would more easily be arrived at. But to give you a better notion of our disputations, I will not barely send you an account of them, but represent them to you ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... Murray. Hammond, a Coventry manufacturer, had scarcely missed an evening at the "Chapter" for forty-five years. His strictures on the events of the day were thought severe but able, and as a friend of liberty he had argued all through the times of Wilkes and the French and American wars. His Socratic arguments were very amusing. Mr. Murray, the great referee of the Wittinagemot, was a Scotch minister, who generally sat at the "Chapter" reading papers from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. He was known to have read straight through every morning and evening paper published ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... precisely at this point of the chase, make it prudent to present it in as startling a shape as possible; in order that, the attention being thoroughly roused, the final assent may not be languid or easily forgotten. Suffer me, therefore, Phdrus, in a Socratic way, to extort an assent from your own arguments—allow me to drive you ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... and the most moral of men, Cicero treated as an usurer, and the pedant Athenaeus as illiterate; the latter points out as a Socratic folly our philosopher disserting on the nature of justice before his judges, who were so many thieves. The malignant buffoonery of Aristophanes treats him much worse; but he, as Jortin says, was a great wit, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... pray that you may be delivered from evil," shouted the Doctor—(his was not the Socratic method)—"but remember this: that as sure as the sparks fly upward there will come a time when, however fast you run, you will be overtaken—cornered—no one to deliver you but yourself—the gods sitting round interested. It is a grim fight, for the Thing, you may be sure, has chosen its right moment. ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... be suspected that in including them Mr Arnold, unconsciously perhaps, but more probably with some consciousness, was feeling his way towards that wide extension of the province of the critic, that resurrection of the general Socratic attitude, which he afterwards adventured. But it cannot be said that his experiments are on this particular occasion in any way disastrous. With both his subjects he had the very strongest sympathy—with Spinoza (as already with Heine) as a remarkable example of the Hebraic spirit and genius, ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... the revolution. He corrected the slip with great rapidity, but he was not quick enough for his watchful enemies, and loudly—discordantly—triumphantly—they repeated the word after him—Revolution—Revolution. However, Mr. Gladstone, after his Socratic fashion, lowered his eyes for a moment and went off into one of those abstract reveries whither he always allows his fancy to wend its way whenever his opponents are particularly rancorous. Then he described the resolution—not the revolution—as in the interest ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... order of intellect, cf. "boorish," "rustic," "loutish," ("pariah," conceivably). "Slavish," "servile," with us connote moral rather than intellectual deficiency, I suppose. Hence it is impossible to preserve the humour of the Socratic argument. See Newman, ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... with several armchairs and a fire. Mrs. Wilder and the cousins and Amanda each smoked a cigarette as if it were symbolical, and they were joined by a grave grey-bearded man with a hyphenated name and slightly Socratic manner, dressed in a very blue linen shirt and collar, a very woolly mustard-coloured suit and loose tie, and manifestly devoted to one of those branches of exemplary domestic decoration that grow upon Socialist soil in England. He joined Betty in ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... nevertheless persuaded to dribble out his narrative; proceeding by instalments, and questioned from point to point, in a kind of Socratic manner, by the landlord. He at last arrives at Mr. Lammeter's marriage, and how the clergyman, when he came to put the questions, inadvertently transposed the position of the two essential names, and asked, "Wilt thou have this man to be thy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... individual. The latter, as we shall find later on, is the characteristic of the true or, more modestly speaking, specifically European conception of love. Platonic love, finally, was the perception of perfection, the Socratic knowledge; its alpha and omega was not, as the mystic and true erotic would have it, its ardour and passion, the fulness of its own being. It had an alien purpose: the knowledge of things divine, by a later period Christianised and ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... Wales, was the real El Dorado. But as he possessed, according to the usual phrase, more wit than money, and no one will discount a check from the aforesaid wit on change, the zeal of Epictetus Moonshine, some time after the breaking up of the Socratic institution for benefitting the human race, so much got the better of self-love, that he committed several petty larcenies in hopes of being transported thither; but whether his courage or his luck failed him, certain it is that he never reached the proper degree ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... contemporary of his, whom he never met, and whom, if he had met, he would probably have insulted—Benjamin Franklin, to wit—preferred winning the case to winning the argument. While still a boy, he tells us, he was fascinated by the Socratic method, and instead of expressing opinions asked leading questions. He ceased to use words like "certainly," "undoubtedly," or anything that gave the air of positiveness to an opinion, and said "I apprehend," or "I conceive," a thing to be ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... is understood that this is merely a personal opinion of the writer and might well have been prefaced by the Socratic "it seems to me." Too much criticism reminds us of wine-tasting—Mr. So-and-So likes port, Mr. So-and-So sherry. The object of fair-minded appreciation is to understand clearly just what each composer set out to do, i.e., what was the natural tendency of his individual ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... capitalised instinct of the tribe," an empirical fact established by heredity, just like fan-tails in pigeons; when Mr. Clifford popularises this teaching in St. George's Hall by announcing that conscience is the voice "of man bidding us to live for man," and Mr. Leslie Stephen tells us that the Socratic conception of conscience "is part of an obsolete form of speculation," we know precisely what judgment to pass upon their assertions. They are speaking, one and all, of the historical growth or natural evolution of that rational faculty in man which they, equally with their opponents, ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... especially the Symposium and Phaedrus, also bear witness to the fact that the Socratic conception of love resembled modern romantic love in its ideal of purity and its altruistic impulses. Especially notable in this respect are the speeches of Phaedrus and Pausanius in the Symposium (175-78), in which love is declared to ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... step in an investigation must be to discover the criterion by which he classifies some literature as poetry and other as not poetry. The characteristic quality, according to Aristotle, which is possessed by the Socratic dialogs, by the Homeric epics, and by the dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and which classifies them together as poetic, is not verse but mimesis, imitation.[13] Exactly what Aristotle meant by imitation has furnished subsequent critics with an excuse ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... the North; that Mrs. Atterbury had spent many of her recent summers there. Their devotion to the Confederacy must be shown by deeds. It was true they had given twenty thousand dollars to the cause, but what was that to threefold millionaires? General Lee, their kinsman, had shaken his Socratic head solemnly when Rosa, at the War Department, told him, as an excellent joke, the strange chance that had brought Vincent's college chum and his family ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... most important uses of this method is found in inductive teaching. The famous "Socratic method" was simply the question-and-answer method applied by Socrates to teaching new truths. This noted teacher would, by a series of skillful questions calculated to call forth what the pupil already knew, lead him on to new knowledge without actually telling the youth anything ...
— The Recitation • George Herbert Betts
... philosophy that was all contemplation, Socrates one that was all conduct and action; Plato found a mean betwixt the two; but they only say this for the sake of talking. The true temperament is found in Socrates; and, Plato is much more Socratic than Pythagoric, and it becomes him better. When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep. Nay, when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts are some part of the time taken up with external occurrences, I some part of the time call ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... are a most valuable patroness,' broke in Don Filippo del Monte, a man of about forty, almost bald, a keen sharpener of epigrams, whose face seemed a sort of Socratic mask; the right eye was forever on the move, and flashed with a thousand changing expressions, while the left remained stationary and glazed behind the single eye-glass, as if he used the one for expressing himself and the other for seeing. 'At the ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... newspapers-There is a great gulf opening, I see, between me and her- And as I can't bridge it over I may as well forget it. Pah! I am boring you, and over-talking myself. Have a cigar, and let us say no more about it. There is more here, old fellow, than you will cure by doses of Socratic Dialectics." ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... did not write me, there were two Platos; I carry in me all the flowers of Socratic talk. But Panaetius concluded me to be spurious; yes, he who concluded that the soul was mortal, would conclude ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... language alone, without harmony, in prose or in verse, and if in verse, either in some one or in a plurality of metres. This form of imitation is to this day without a name. We have no common name for a mime of Sophron or Xenarchus and a Socratic Conversation; and we should still be without one even if the imitation in the two instances were in trimeters or elegiacs or some other kind of verse—though it is the way with people to tack on 'poet' to the name of a metre, and talk of elegiac-poets ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... for his copiousness, little dreaming that we are all better men for hearing him; that his great gray head and clear kindly eye ("His mild and magnificent eye": whose is that phrase?) are to us a symbol of Socratic virtue and power; that there is not one of us who, after an hour or so with him, does not depart with private resolutions of honour and fidelity to wisdom. How he irrigates ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... here." And for this—and a few other similar observations—be was compelled to drink a substitute for coffee—he was an infidel! Within the last thirty years the churches of Christendom have, in the main, adopted the Socratic proposition that you and I are here. That is, we have made progress by getting away from narrow theology and recognizing humanity. We do not know anything about either Olympus or Elysium, but we ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... such things, but who could hear Rubinstein's touch without being benefited? I believe that in teaching touch the teacher should first give his model of the touch required and then proceed from this positive ideal, by means of the so-called Socratic method of inducing the pupil to produce a similar result through repeated questions. In this way the pupil will not be obliged to resign his individuality, as would be the case if he followed strict technical ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... then despatched to the best restaurant in the neighbourhood, and the three adventurers made a less Socratic dinner ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... careful reconsideration of the terms and problem before him; but if he finds the unexpected conclusion flowing from those premises, he will have enlarged his knowledge of his art and discovered a congenial good. He will have made progress in the Socratic science ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana |
