It didn't help that he was by all accounts physically ugly, with a turned-up nose and bulging eyes. Despite his intellect and knowledge, he rejected the kind of fame and power that Athenians were expected to strive for. His lifestyle – and ultimately his death – embodied his spirit of questioning every assumption about virtue, wisdom and the good life. Socrates did not write philosophy, and what we know about him comes mainly from two of his younger students, Xenophon and Plato. They recorded the most significant accounts of Socrates' life and philosophy. For both, the Socrates who appears bears the mark of the writer. One of the greatest paradoxes that Socrates helped his students explore was whether weakness of the will—doing wrong when you truly knew what was right—ever really existed. He seemed to think otherwise: people only made mistakes when the perceived benefits seemed to outweigh the costs at the time. So developing personal ethics is a matter of mastering what he called “the art of measurement,” correcting the distortions that skew one's analysis of benefits and