On one occasion one of his friends was lamenting to him that he had lost his memoranda, and he said to him, "You ought to have written them on your mind, and not on paper." A favourite saying of his was, "That envious people were devoured by their own disposition, just as iron is by rust." Another was, "That those who wish to be immortal ought to live piously and justly." He used to say too, "That cities were ruined when they were unable to distinguish worthless citizens from virtuous ones."
On one occasion he was being praised by some wicked men and said, "I am sadly afraid that I must have done some wicked thing." One of his favourite sayings was, "That the fellowship of brothers of one mind was stronger than any fortified city." He used to say, "That those things were the best for a man to take on a journey, which would float with him if he were shipwrecked." He was once reproached for being intimate with wicked men, and said, "Physicians also live with those who are sick; and yet they do not catch fevers." He used to say, "that it was an absurd thing to clean a cornfield of tares, and in war to get rid of bad soldiers, and yet not to rid one's self in a city of the wicked citizens." When he was asked what advantage he had ever derived from philosophy, he replied, "The advantage of being able to converse with myself." At a drinking party, a man once said to him, "Give us a song," and he replied, "Do you play us a tune on the flute." When Diogenes asked him for a tunic, he bade him fold his cloak. He was asked on one occasion what learning was the most necessary, and he replied, "To unlearn one's bad habits." And he used to exhort those who found themselves ill spoken of, to endure it more than they would any one's throwing stones at them. He used to laugh at Plato as conceited; accordingly, once when there was a fine procession, seeing a horse neighing he said to Plato, "I think you too would be a very frisky horse:" and he said this all the more, because Plato kept continually praising the horse. At another time, he had gone to see him when he was ill, and when he saw there a dish in which Plato had been sick, he said, "I see your bile there but I do not see your conceit." He used to advise the Athenians to pass a vote that asses were horses; and, as they thought that irrational, he said," Why, those whom you make generals have never learnt to be really generals, they have only been voted such."
A man said to him one day, "Many people praise you." "Why, what evil," said he, "have I done?" When he turned the rent in his cloak outside, Socrates seeing it, said to him, "I see your vanity through the hole in your cloak." On another occasion, the question was put to him by some one, as Phanias relates, in his treatise on the Philosophers of the Socratic school, what a man could do to show himself an honourable and a virtuous man; and he replied, "If you atttend to those who understand the subject, and learn from them that you ought to shun the bad habits which you have." Some one was praising luxury in his hearing, and he said, "May the children of my enemies be luxurious." Seeing a young man place himself in a carefully studied attitude before a modeller, he said, "Tell me, if the brass could speak, on what would it pride itself?" And when the young man replied, "On its beauty." "Are you not then," said he, "ashamed to rejoice in the same thing as an inanimate piece of brass?" A young man from Pontus once promised to recollect him, if a vessel of salt fish arrived; and so he took him with him and also an empty bag, and went to a woman who sold meal, and filled his sack and went away; and when the woman asked him to pay for it, he said, "The young man will pay you, when the vessel of salt fish comes home."