Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.

The saying urges deliberate self-improvement through reading—treating books as concentrated deposits of others’ hard-won experience. Its logic is economical: by studying what earlier thinkers have already struggled to discover, you can advance more quickly and avoid repeating their errors. The emphasis is not on passive consumption but on using “other men’s writings” as tools for moral and intellectual formation. Although often attributed to Socrates, the sentiment aligns more broadly with ancient ethical traditions that prize learning from exemplars and inherited wisdom, and it reflects a perennial ideal of education as the efficient transmission of insight across generations.