Socrates, Plato and Aristotle Quotes, Checked
What They Actually Said

Socrates, Plato and Aristotle are among the names most often attached to ancient wisdom, and all three collect lines they never wrote. Socrates in particular wrote no philosophy. Here are ten claims, checked against public-domain English translations: Benjamin Jowett’s Plato, W. D. Ross’s and D. P. Chase’s translations of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, William Ellis’s Politics, and R. D. Hicks’s translation of Diogenes Laertius, with the Greek where it matters. When we say a line is not in a work, we mean we searched the complete translations named in that section.

1. “Socrates wrote down his philosophy”

Myth He wrote no philosophy. (Plato’s Phaedo says that in prison he put some of Aesop’s fables into verse.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes him as famous “despite having written nothing”, and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains the consequence: “Because he wrote nothing, what we know of his ideas and methods comes to us mainly from his contemporaries and disciples.” Those portraits differ. The Stanford Encyclopedia calls the result the “Socratic problem”, “a rat’s nest of complexities arising from the fact that various people wrote about Socrates whose accounts differ in crucial respects”. So “Socrates said” usually means “Plato has Socrates say”.

2. “The unexamined life is not worth living”

True It is in Plato’s Apology 38a, his version of Socrates’ defence speech. The Stanford Encyclopedia renders it “the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being”, said “at his trial”. In Jowett’s translation, Socrates has just said that to discourse daily “about virtue, and of those other things about which you hear me examining myself and others, is the greatest good of man”, and “the unexamined life is not worth living”. He is explaining why he cannot simply hold his tongue and go to live in another city.

3. “I know that I know nothing”

Partly true The idea, known as Socratic ignorance, is real; the tidy paradox is not in the Apology. At 21d, Socrates compares himself with a man who thinks he is wise. In Jowett’s translation: “for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know”. The Greek of that sentence is narrower: “ὅτι ἃ μὴ οἶδα οὐδὲ οἴομαι εἰδέναι”, “that what I do not know, I do not think I know” (our translation). The point is about not pretending. But the Apology does come close to the famous line elsewhere: at 21b Socrates says “I know that I have no wisdom, small or great”, and at 22d, among the craftsmen, “I was conscious that I knew nothing at all, as I may say”. What it never does is turn this into the neat paradox; even at 22d he hedges with “as I may say”. The tidy English version does appear in Jowett’s own introduction to his translation: “He knew nothing, and knew that he knew nothing”. That is the translator summarising, not Plato.

Other texts come close too. At the end of the first book of Plato’s Republic, Socrates says: “the result of the whole discussion has been that I know nothing at all. For I know not what justice is”. And the biographer Diogenes Laertius writes that Socrates said “he knew nothing except just the fact of his ignorance”.

4. “Wisdom begins in wonder”

Partly true The word is philosophy, not wisdom. In Plato’s Theaetetus, in Jowett’s translation, Socrates says: “wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder”. Aristotle says much the same in his Metaphysics, in Ross’s translation: “For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize”.

5. “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle”

Myth as Plato. It is not in the eight Jowett dialogues we searched, and its traceable origin is modern. The quotation researchers at Quote Investigator trace it to a Christmas message around the end of 1897 by Ian Maclaren, “the pseudonym or pen name of Rev. John Watson”, in the form: “Be pitiful, for every man is fighting a hard battle.” As they note, “The original aphorism did not use the word ‘kind’.”

6. “The measure of a man is what he does with power”

Myth as Plato, though a real Greek proverb lies behind it. It is not in the Jowett dialogues we searched, we could not find where the English wording comes from, and none of the pages we checked that repeat it gives a dialogue and passage. The ancient proverb is about office, and even the ancient sources disagree about who said it. Diogenes Laertius gives it to the sage Pittacus: “Office shows the man.” Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, gives it to another sage, Bias, and explains why it matters, in Ross’s translation: “the saying of Bias is thought to be true, that ‘rule will show the man’; for a ruler is necessarily in relation to other men and a member of a society.”

7. “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it”

Myth as Aristotle. It is not in the Nicomachean Ethics, where the real “mark of an educated man” line is, and it says something quite different. In Ross’s translation of Book I, chapter 3: “it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits”. Aristotle is saying you should not demand the same certainty from ethics as from mathematics: “it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs”.

8. “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom”

Myth as Aristotle. We did not find it in the Nicomachean Ethics, the Politics or the Metaphysics (all fourteen books, in the Ross and Smith translation on Wikisource), and none of the pages we checked that repeat it gives a passage. “Know thyself” is real, but it is older than Aristotle: it was an inscription at Delphi. In Plato’s Protagoras, in Jowett’s translation, it is one of “the far-famed inscriptions, which are in all men’s mouths—‘Know thyself,’ and ‘Nothing too much.’” In the Phaedrus, Socrates says: “I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says”.

9. “Man is by nature a political animal”

True It is Aristotle, Politics Book I. In William Ellis’s translation: “man is naturally a political animal”.

10. “Plato’s noble lie” and “the cave”

True, both are in Plato’s Republic. In Book III, Socrates proposes a founding myth for his ideal city. Jowett translates it as a “royal lie”: “How then may we devise one of those needful falsehoods of which we lately spoke—just one royal lie which may deceive the rulers, if that be possible, and at any rate the rest of the city?” “Noble lie” is another translation of the same Greek word, gennaion. Eric Brown, in the Stanford Encyclopedia, writes that the rulers “advance a ‘noble lie’ to convince citizens of their unequal standing and deep tie to the city”, and judges: “This propagandistic control plainly represents a totalitarian concern”. He is careful to separate it from the city’s laws, of which he writes: “There is nothing especially totalitarian about the rule of law pervasive in Kallipolis”. That is his reading.

The cave, in Book VII, is an allegory Socrates tells to Glaucon in the dialogue. Jowett: “Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light”, whose prisoners “have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move”.

Our reading

The misquotes here share a pattern: they turn a specific, often uncomfortable remark into a general piece of advice. Socrates’ ignorance becomes a clever paradox, Aristotle’s point about precision becomes a slogan about open-mindedness, and a proverb about what office reveals becomes a line about power. The originals are harder, and we think better. The quickest check is to ask for the book and the passage, then read the paragraph around it.

Sources

• Plato, Apology, Theaetetus, Republic, Protagoras, Charmides, Phaedrus, Gorgias and Laws, trans. Benjamin Jowett, Project Gutenberg; Greek text ed. John Burnet (Oxford, 1903), Perseus Digital Library.
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. W. D. Ross, Wikisource, and trans. D. P. Chase, Project Gutenberg; Metaphysics, trans. W. D. Ross and J. A. Smith (1908), Wikisource; Politics, trans. William Ellis, Project Gutenberg.
• Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Books I and II, trans. R. D. Hicks, Wikisource.
• Debra Nails and S. Sara Monoson, “Socrates”, and Eric Brown, “Plato’s Ethics and Politics in The Republic”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; James M. Ambury, “Socrates”, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Quote Investigator, “Be Kind; Everyone You Meet Is Fighting a Hard Battle” (2010, updated 2025).

Checked September 2026.

Related: Did They Really Say That? · Diogenes and the Cynics · Epicurus