…he would say to himself, “of how many things have I no need.”
The iambic lines are part of fragment 105 of Philemon, by way of Stobaeus. If that is actually a good attribution, it would seem unlikely Socrates was quoting them:
thank you for your reply, and sorry for my late answer, but since your answer was all Greek to me (sorry for the pun, I just couldn’t resist) I was at a loss at first. But then, using the citation I was able to have a look at a Firmin Didot-edition of Diogenes Laertius and found there a Latin translation:
Feeling that this might be a good opportunity to take a vacation from my current Latin transcription project, I immediately set out to transcribe the section about Socrates (it isn’t long, after all). I planned to answer your post once I am finished, but that was a bit optimistic, especially since I want to test a tool for generating (hopefully better looking) e-texts. I will post a link to it (on my homepage, it’s too short for Project Gutenberg), as soon as I am finished.