The inquiry of truth, which is the love-making, or wooing of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature.
Essays (1625) ‘Of Truth’
Francis Bacon
Death is one of two things. Either it is annihilation, and the dead have no consciousness of anything; or, as we are told, it is really a change: a migration of the soul from this place to another.
In Plato, Apology, 41
Socrates (469 – 399 BC)
Remember that no one loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any other than this which he now loses.
Meditations, II, 14
Marcus Aurelius (121 – 180)
The universe is change: life is what thinking makes of it.
lb, IV, 3
The whole is more than the sum of parts.
Metaphysics
Aristotle (384 – 322 BC)
What we have to learn to do we learn by doing.
Nicomachean Ethics, I
That man is wisest who, like socrates, realizes that his wisdom is worthless.
Apologia of Socretes
Plato (429 – 347 BC)
The good is the beautiful.
lb Lysis
Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.
lb Republic, IV