Unexamined Life Quotes

• The unexamined life is not worth living.

  Socrates

  Inspirational, Life, Motivational

  In Plato 'Apology' 38a

  176 Copy quote

  Show source

• The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.

  Plato

  Philosophy, Life Is, Life Worth Living

  Apology, 38a (translated by H Tredennick).

  33 Copy quote

  Show source

• The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the life too closely examined may not be lived at all.

  Mark Twain

  Wisdom, May, Worth Living

  8 Copy quote

• An unexamined life is not worth living, and an unexamined faith is not worth holding.

  Ergun Caner

  Life Is, Life Is Not Worth Living, Worth Living

  13 Copy quote

• Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued." "It is not living that matters, but living rightly. The unexamined life is not worth living.

  Socrates

  Good Life, Inspirational Life, Matter

  13 Copy quote

• Writing is an act of hope. It means carving order out of chaos, of challenging one's own beliefs and assumptions, of facing the world with eyes and heart wide open. Through writing we declare a personal identity amid faceless anonymity. We find purpose and beauty and meaning even when the rational mind argues that none of these exist. Writing therefore, is also an act of courage. How much easier is it to lead an unexamined life than to confront yourself on the page?

  Jack Heffron

  Writing, Heart, Mean

  47 Copy quote

• No one seriously doubts Socrates' maxim: The unexamined life isn't worth living. Self-assessment and attempts at self-improvement are essential aspects of "the good life." Yes, we should engage in ruthless self-reflection and harsh scrutiny, but we should simultaneously acknowledge that such introspection will, at best, only result in a partial view of our minds at work. Complete objectivity is not an option.

  Robert A. Burton

  Good Life, Humility, Reflection

  Robert A. Burton, M.D., M.D. (2008). “On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not”, p.162, Macmillan

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Plato, What If, Meaning Of Life

  30 Copy quote

• The Prayer of Examine produces within us the priceless grace of self-knowledge. I wish I could adequately explain to you how great a grace this truly is. Unfortunately, contemporary men and women simply do not value self-knowledge in the same way that all preceding generations have. For us technocratic knowledge reigns supreme. Even when we pursue self-knowledge, we all too often reduce it to a hedonistic search for personal peace and prosperity. How poor we are! Even the pagan philosophers were wiser than this generation. They knew that an unexamined life was not worth living.

  Richard J. Foster

  Prayer, Men, Self

  6 Copy quote

• Socrates told us, "the unexamined life is not worth living." I think he's calling for curiosity, more than knowledge. In every human society at all times and at all levels, the curious are at the leading edge.

  Roger Ebert

  Thinking, Curiosity, Calling

  8 Copy quote

• It may be true that the unexamined life is not worth living-but neither is the unlived life worth examining.

  Dan Millman

  Life, May, Action

  9 Copy quote

• If I tell you that I would be disobeying the god and on that account it is impossible for me to keep quiet, you won't be persuaded by me, taking it that I am ionizing. And if I tell you that it is the greatest good for a human being to have discussions every day about virtue and the other things you hear me talking about, examining myself and others, and that the unexamined life is not livable for a human being, you will be even less persuaded.

  Socrates

  Life, Talking, Would Be

  21 Copy quote

• It is the greatest good for an individual to discuss virtue (aka areté) every day...for the unexamined life is not worth living.

  Socrates

  Life, Aka, Individuality

  12 Copy quote

• An unexamined life is a life of no account.

  Socrates

  Philosophical, Life Is, Accounts

  46 Copy quote

• Writing, therefore, is also an act of courage. How much easier is it to lead an unexamined life than to confront yourself on the page? How much easier is it to surrended to materialism or cynicism or to a hundred other ways of life that are, in fact, ways to hide from life and from our fears. When we write, we resist the facile seduction of theses simpler roads. We insist on finding out and declaring the truths that we find, and we dare to out those truths on the page.

  Jack Heffron

  Writing, Pages, Way

  10 Copy quote

• In a speech, the columnist Charles Krauthammer.... offered a new version of Socrates' famous saying, "The unexamined life is not worth living." In our age of bottomless self-love and obsession with our own feelings, Krauthammer suggested, "The too-examined life is not worth living either.

  John Leo

  Self, Feelings, Age

  4 Copy quote

• Politics is pervasive. Everything is political and the choice to be "apolitical" is usually just an endorsement of the status quo and the unexamined life.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Choices, Political, Endorsements

  Interview with Benjamin Cohen, believermag.com. September 2009.

  38 Copy quote

  Show source

• Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. But the over-examined life makes you wish you were dead. Given the alternative, I'd rather be living.

  Saul Bellow

  Wish, Alternatives, Life Is

  6 Copy quote

• Where once the student was taught that the unexamined life was not worth living, he is now taught that the profitably lived life is not worth examining.

  Benjamin Barber

  Taught, Students, Life Is

  9 Copy quote

• I started asking the big questions that I had asked in college, that my compatriots the Greek philosophers had asked, like 'what is a good life?' Socrates famously said that 'The unexamined life is not worth living.' I started asking these questions from the starting point of 'what is success?'

  Arianna Huffington

  Good Life, College, Greek

  4 Copy quote

• Look - I understand that an unexamined life is not worth living, but do you think I could someday have an unexamined lunch?

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Thinking, Lunch, Looks

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2010). “The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims”, p.148, A&C Black

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• How much easier is it to lead an unexamined life than to confront yourself on the page?

  Jack Heffron

  Pages, Easier

  Jack Heffron (2012). “The Writer's Idea Book 10th Anniversary Edition: How to Develop Great Ideas for Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Screenplays”, p.1, Writer's Digest Books

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think psychologically [Margaret Thatcher] is really worth studying. I am reading Charles Moore's biography of her, and he has gotten us right there with a woman who lived the unexamined life, and lived it deliberately, and who has contempt for history, even her own.

  Hilary Mantel

  Reading, Thinking, Biographies

  Source: newrepublic.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Perhaps the single most important therapeutic credo that I have is that the unexamined life is not worth living.

  Irvin D. Yalom

  Life, Important, Therapeutic

  Irvin D. Yalom (2012). “Love's Executioner: And Other Tales of Psychotherapy”, p.36, Basic Books

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth.

  Walter Lippmann

  Men, Errors, Order

  Walter Lippmann, Clinton Rossiter, James Lare (1982). “The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy”, p.233, Harvard University Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source