Socrates
Whom, well inspired, the oracle pronounced,
Wisest of men. [ Milton ]

What is good only because it pleases cannot be pronounced good till it has been found to please. [ Johnson ]

Madame de Stael pronounced architecture to be frozen music; so is statuary crystallized spirituality. [ Alcott ]

The last day must always be awaited by man, and no man should be pronounced happy before his death and his final obsequies. [ Ovid ]

Sir Anthony Absolute, two or three years before Evelina appeared, spoke the sense of the great body of sober fathers and husbands when he pronounced the circulating library an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge. [ Macaulay ]

Socrates was pronounced by the oracle of Delphos to be the wisest man in Greece, which he would turn from himself ironically, saying there could be nothing in him to verify the oracle, except this, that he was not wise and knew it, and others were not wise and knew it not. [ Bacon ]

Extreme old age is childhood; extreme wisdom is ignorance, for so it may be called, since the man whom the oracle pronounced the wisest of men professed that he knew nothing; yea, push a coward to the extreme and he will show courage; oppress a man to the last, and he will rise above oppression. [ J. Beaumont ]