Socrates & Excellence

Below a summation of what struck me in the few minutes spent reading whatever relevant piece of Socrates' thoughts on excellence or virtue.

"To be perfect one must behave perfectly, otherwise one would not be perfect."
"Yes, Socrates, that would seem to be a reasonable use of 'perfect.'"
"The imperfect man behaves imperfectly because he is imperfect. If he were perfect he wouldn't behave imperfectly as a perfect man would behave perfectly."
"All linguistically sound."
"Only a man ignorant of the desirability of being perfect would wish to remain imperfect."
"And how does he attain this perfect state in consequence of which he acts perfectly?"
"By acting perfectly."
"All good stuff, Socrates. And how does he go about behaving perfectly?"
"By means of knowledge of how to act perfectly."
"Someone should be writing this stuff down, Socrates. It would be a tragedy if this got lost."

I wasn't going to bother posting the above, thinking the point had been already made in some recent post or two, but randomly opening my Early Socratic Dialogues book presented me with this line from the helpful commenter on one the dialogues of genius contained within:

Socrates has introduced the notion that the presence of fineness in things is responsible for their fineness.

I admit to wondering if Socrates' reputation for wisdom- lets say he was known as Wise Socrates- wasn't somewhat in the ironical sense, as where a big man is known as Little John, or a small man Big John. I'd like to add that I think the presence of smallness in things is responsible for their smallness.