A man said to [Antisthenes] 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 attend 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.”
[Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, Book VI, "Life of Antisthenes".]
