#1: Socrates

For me Socrates was the beginning. Before that I had the impression that philosophy was just about intellectuals who tried to confuse each other with fancy words. Then one day (I can't recall how old I was but if I had to guess I would say 15) I was in the library and grabbed some book of Plato and browsed it a bit. And it seemed interesting as it was one of the dialogues of Socrates. So I borrowed it and read it with enjoyment. Perhaps part of enjoyment was that I could really understand the points of discussions. Topics were very interesting, going through questions like "what is love?", "what is virtue?" and so on. I could not help admiring the way Socrates discussed with people. Most often, he started very innocently by inquiring something from person. Person would tell what he knew and little by little Socrates would ask more questions depending what person said and soon person would realize that he actually doesn't know the thing he thought he knew. That was always main point of Socrates. That if we open our eyes, we start to notice that all that "knowledge" which we have absorbed from various sources is far from actual truth/reality.

Socrates is named as father of philosophy but in my eyes he's a spiritual character just like many other religious characters. For example his (or Plato's) "theory of ideas" could come straight from zen master's mouth. Socrates was also rebellious character and as often happens with rebellious characters society eliminated him. Socrates did not write anything down (or at least nothing has survived to this day) so it's not clear how many of his dialogues actually happend in presented form or how much Plato affected to the content but that's not really important at all.

After reading dialogues of Socrates I became interested about philosophy and read some more (namely Plato, Aristotele, Diogenes, Descartes and Spinoza) but in the end it seemed like the "origin" of philosophy had the clearest vision. Still, it was only because of Socrates that I considered applying to university to study philosophy. At the end I didn't but that was because of laziness to read huge philosophy book which main content was such mixture of fancy words that in my humble opinion was missing the whole point altogether.

Here are few nice Socrates quotes:

If thou continuest to take delight in idle argumentation thou mayest be qualified to combat with the sophists, but will never know how to live with men.

Let him that would move the world first move himself.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Wisdom begins in wonder.