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Early Life and Background
Socrates was born around 469 BCE in Athens, in the deme of Alopece, at the crest of the citys democratic experiment and on the eve of its imperial peak. Later tradition names his father Sophroniscus as a stonemason or sculptor and his mother Phaenarete as a midwife - occupations that became metaphors in the afterlife of his thought: shaping souls as one shapes stone, and delivering ideas as a midwife delivers children. He grew into manhood in a polis where public speech was power, and where comedy and tragedy, lawcourts and assembly, all trained citizens to argue about virtue, justice, and the good life.

His adulthood unfolded through Athens darkest civic trauma, the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE), with its plague, factionalism, and moral exhaustion. Socrates served as a hoplite at Potidaea, Delium, and Amphipolis, and later writers remembered his steadiness under pressure - a bodily courage that sat oddly beside his refusal to flatter crowds or seek office. He married Xanthippe and had children, yet lived conspicuously without luxury, haunting workshops, gymnasia, and porticoes where artisans, generals, and ambitious youths crossed paths. The city that raised him on debate would eventually treat his questioning as a threat.

Education and Formative Influences
Socrates left no writings; his education is reconstructed through Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes, and later biographers. He appears to have absorbed the new sciences and cosmologies circulating from Ionia and southern Italy, and he likely encountered Anaxagoras ideas indirectly through Athenian circles. Yet his decisive turn was away from natural philosophy toward ethical inquiry: what courage is, what piety is, what justice is, and why knowledge should govern desire. In a culture increasingly dominated by itinerant sophists who sold rhetorical skill for political advancement, Socrates cultivated a different authority - the authority of relentless questioning, guided (as he said) by an inner divine sign that checked him from certain actions.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points
Socrates vocation was conversation: short encounters that began in politeness and ended in intellectual disarray, as confident definitions collapsed under cross-examination. This elenchus, later stylized in Platos early dialogues (Apology, Euthyphro, Laches, Charmides), made him both magnetic and dangerous, especially to the young men who imitated his posture toward reputation and power - among them Alcibiades, Critias, and Charmides, figures entangled with oligarchic coups and the Thirty Tyrants. In 399 BCE, after democracy was restored, he was indicted by Meletus with Anytus and Lycon supporting: impiety (not acknowledging the citys gods, introducing new divinities) and corrupting the youth. Found guilty, he refused exile or silence and drank hemlock, a public death that converted a local trial into a civilizational drama about conscience, speech, and the limits of the state.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes
Socrates method began in wonder and ended in disciplined ignorance, a posture that was less modesty than strategy: it lured others into revealing what they assumed they knew. "Wisdom begins in wonder". In Platos portrait, he treats philosophy as therapy for the soul, exposing the hidden contradictions that allow appetite, honor, and fear to masquerade as knowledge. His most famous claim is not that truth is inaccessible, but that moral certainty is usually counterfeit - "I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing". The psychological core is a fierce refusal of self-deception: to live with unexamined beliefs is to live at the mercy of fashion and impulse.

Ethically, Socrates insisted that virtue is tied to knowledge and that wrongdoing harms the doer first by deforming the soul. This inwardness did not make him apolitical; it made him unmanageable. He framed integrity as a kind of civic hazard, and later tradition captured the cost in a blunt self-diagnosis: "I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live". His style was plain, ironic, and forensic - a cross between street talk and courtroom interrogation - but his themes were grave: the immortality and care of the soul, the hierarchy of goods, the fear of death as ignorance, and the demand that reasons, not status, rule a life. Even his daimonion, often misunderstood as mysticism, functioned as an ethical alarm, a felt boundary against expedience.

Legacy and Influence
Socrates enduring influence is paradoxical: a man without books became the hinge of Western philosophy. Plato turned his death into the founding martyrdom of rational inquiry, Xenophon into a model of practical virtue, and later schools into competing heirs - Cynics drew his austerity, Stoics his moral independence, Skeptics his disciplined doubt. The trial gave later ages a template for the collision between free thought and public authority, from Roman dissidents to Enlightenment critics and modern civil rights advocates. In Athens, he was one more condemned citizen; in intellectual history, he became the emblem of the examined life, the teacher whose greatest work was the kind of person he tried to make in others.

Our collection contains 43 quotes who is written by Socrates, under the main topics: Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Friendship - Meaning of Life - Military & Soldier.

Other people realated to Socrates: Plato (Philosopher), Euripides (Poet), Søren Kierkegaard (Philosopher), Democritus (Philosopher), Anaxagoras (Philosopher), Heraclitus (Philosopher), Diogenes (Philosopher), Pericles (Statesman), Aesop (Author), Aristotle Onassis (Businessman)

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