DIOGENES LAERTIUS

"...but they do not catch the fever." He said it was strange that we weed out the tares from the corn and the unfit in war, but do not excuse evil men from the service of the state. Asked what advantage he had gained from philosophy, he said, "The ability to hold converse with myself." When someone asked him for a song while drinking, he replied, "Then you must accompany me on the pipe." 7 When Diogenes asked him for a tunic, he ordered him to double his cloak. Asked what learning is most necessary, he said, "To unlearn what is wrong." He advised that people should endure slander more courageously than if they were pelted with stones.

He used to taunt Plato for being conceited. When a procession took place, he saw a spirited horse and said to Plato, "You seem to me as if you would be a proud, showy horse." This was because Plato was constantly praising horses. And one day, coming to visit him when he was ill, he saw the basin into which Plato had vomited and said, "I see the bile here, 8 but I do not see the pride." He advised the Athenians to vote that donkeys are horses; when they thought this was absurd, he said, "But yet generals are found among you who have learned nothing, but are merely elected." To someone who said, "Many people praise you," he said, "Why, what wrong have I done?" When he turned the torn part of his cloak to the outside, Socrates, seeing it, said, "I see your vanity through your cloak." Asked by someone, as Phanias says in his On the Socratics, what he must do...