Q0004

Socrates

A verified English rendering from the curated archive.

English

No one errs willingly.
Thinker Socrates
School Socratic School
Source Plato, Protagoras 345e
Theme Morality
Another quotation More from this thinker

Source context

This English passage is associated with Plato, Protagoras 345e, within the tradition of Socratic School. The wording below is a verified rendering prepared for careful reading rather than a claim of unique translation authority.

A short reading

Read in the register of morality, the sentence asks the reader to test an assumption rather than to collect a slogan. In Socrates's wider work, similar claims are usually offered as prompts for judgment: what would have to be true for the sentence to hold, and what would follow if it did?

How to cite this quotation

APA: Socrates. (n.d.). No one errs willingly. In Philosophy Blind Box. https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0004

MLA: Socrates. “No one errs willingly..” Philosophy Blind Box, https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0004.

Chicago: Socrates. “No one errs willingly..” Philosophy Blind Box. Accessed 2026. https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0004.

Same thinker

More from Socrates

  1. The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.
  2. What I do not know, I do not claim to know.
  3. It is worse to do injustice than to suffer it.
  4. Virtue does not come from money, but from virtue come money and all other good things for human beings.
  5. One must never do injustice in any way.

All quotations by Socrates

Same theme

More on morality

  1. It is worse to do injustice than to suffer it.
  2. Love is the desire for the perpetual possession of the good.
  3. Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe…: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
  4. Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
  5. Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never merely as a means.

Browse the morality theme