Top Lessons and Thoughts From Plato's Apology

Below are the highlights from the post I just published. To read the full post with highlights from the book go here. Also, I have share the link on HackerNews. If you like this post would love it if you could upvote there :)

Summary

The Apology is Plato's record of the speech given by Socrates in court as he tries to defend himself in 399BCE against the accusations of "corrupting the young, and by not believing in the gods in whom the city believes".

There are three parts to this work (Spoiler Alert).

1. Socrates defends himself against accusations.
2. Socrates argues for various punishments after the jury finds Socrates guilty.
3. Socrates' last words after the jury condemns Socrates to death.

My Thoughts

These are 3 very different "scenes". And we get to see Socrates in each one of them. It is fascinating to see what arguments Socrates comes up with and how he presents them to the public. It is very inspiring to see how a man handles himself when sentenced to death.

For me, this work has the highest ratio of notes to words (ie. how many notes I took compared with the size of the work).

Here are some life lessons that I have picked up from this work:

• You should always show humility by assuming that you don't know something. If you always assume that you know everything, you can't really learn anything new.
• We only fear death because we know nothing about it. In fact, death is the ultimate test to "we fear what we don't know" since it is likely we will never find out what happens after death.
• Start by trying to improve yourself, not others.
• "Good men" don't spend much time thinking about how to avoid death, but rather they think about doing good deeds. That's all that matters.

Some interesting stats: