Skip to content

When he was asked what advantage had accrued to him from philosophy, his answer was, “The ability to hold converse with myself.”

— Antisthenes

ἐρωτηθεὶς τί αὐτῷ περιγέγονεν ἐκ φιλοσοφίας, ἔφη, “τὸ δύνασθαι ἑαυτῷ ὁμιλεῖν.”

Original text (Ancient Greek)

Another quote →

Notes from Wikiquote

§ 4

Topics

Philosophy

More quotes by Antisthenes

It is a royal privilege to do good and be ill spoken of.

Being asked what learning is the most necessary, he replied, "How to get rid of having anything to unlearn."

States are doomed when they are unable to distinguish good men from bad.

As iron is eaten away by rust, so the envious are consumed by their own passion.

Pay attention to your enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes.

All Antisthenes quotes →

You may also like

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped.

Robert Anton Wilson

Every morning
I shall concern myself anew about the boundary
Between the love-deed-Yes and the power-deed-No
And pressing forward honor reality.

Martin Buber Power and Love (1926)

In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended.

John C. Lilly The Human Biocomputer (1974)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Antisthenes (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.