Top 73 Quotes About Unexamined
#1. Generally speaking, writers who have been at it for a while, and who are any good at it, suffer from an acute kind of self-knowledge. The unexamined life is not a risk for them.
Mark Slouka
#2. 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
#3. Socrates said that an unexamined life is not worth living. But you know, an over-examined life can be a real crap festival, too.
Alex Bosworth
#4. William James said, "You cannot travel without until you have travelled within." Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." People who discover their sweet spot are people who take the inward journey and examine themselves. They make the choice to live until they die.
Scott M. Fay
#5. Progress has always been achieved by probing well-entrenched and well-founded forms of life with unpopular and unfounded values. This is how man gradually freed himself from fear and from the tyranny of unexamined systems.
Paul Karl Feyerabend
#6. Unexamined wallpaper is classroom practices and institutional policies that are so entrenched in school culture or a teacher's paradigm that their ability to affect student learning is never probed.
Richard Elmore
#7. Democracy ... .[is not] ... simply a form of government but an organizing principle that bundles individual freedoms, Christianity, and capitalism into a marketable product carrying with it the unexamined promise of wealth and prosperity.
Thomas King
#8. Get yourself healthy before you get yourself married. Too often we bring our unexamined selves into our marriage relationship. Also, have a cultivating commitment to have a quality relationship with each other in your marriage.
Neil Clark Warren
#9. The unexamined life is not worth living. But if all you're doing is examining, then you're not living!
Adam Leipzig
#10. I think that for humans, the most regrettable of omissions, along with unshed tears and unexamined lives, is untold stories, the things not shared, the lost opportunity to be honest about oneself and tender toward others.
Martha M. Moravec
#11. In the American Technopoly, public opinion is a yes or no answer to an unexamined question.
Neil Postman
#12. It may be true that the unexamined life is not worth living-but neither is the unlived life worth examining.
Dan Millman
#13. 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
#14. Skepticism is essential to the quest for knowledge, for it is in the seedbed of puzzlement that genuine inquiry takes root. Without skepticism, we may remain mired in unexamined belief systems that are accepted as sacrosanct yet have no factual basis in reality.
Paul Kurtz
#15. ( ... )while it's true that the unexamined life is not worth living, it's also true that the unlived life isn't worth examining.
Robert McKee
#16. 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
#17. The free person does not live by an unexamined faith. To do so is to worship an idol whittled out and made into a fetish.
James Luther Adams
#18. The most important thing is to be true to yourself, however you feel, and not try to feel or behave differently because you think you should, or someone has told you how you must feel. But do think about it. Unexamined feelings lead to all kinds of trouble.
Garth Nix
#19. Dogs are never in a bad mood over something you said at breakfast. Dogs never sniff at the husks of old conversations, or conduct autopsies on weekends gone wrong. An unexamined life may not be worth living, but the overexamined life is hell. We talk too much.
Abigail Thomas
#20. The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management's unexamined beliefs.
Gary Hamel
#21. Consciousness is the basis of both the examined and the unexamined life.
Sam Harris
#22. So dogma, doctrine, unexamined assumptions, that's what it is to be sharing that, the hippies shadow, no way of grounding it to reality. It's where we're just cut off from reality unless we can argue, we can substantiate, we can justify, we can convince each other.
Rebecca Goldstein
#23. The very essence of leadership is you have a vision. It's got to be a vision you articulate clearly and forcefully on every occasion.
Whatever you value, be committed to it and let nothing distract you from this goal. The uncommitted life, like Plato's unexamined life, is not worth living.
Theodore M. Hesburgh
#24. Look - I understand that an unexamined life is not worth living, but do you think I could someday have an unexamined lunch?
Elizabeth Gilbert
#25. I think I have never known anyone who led quite unexamined a life.
Joan Didion
#26. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the life too closely examined may not be lived at all.
Mark Twain
#27. Psychologists, for reasons of clinical necessity or vagaries of temperament, have chosen to dissect and catalog the morbid emotions - depression, anger, anxiety - and to leave largely unexamined the more vital, positive ones.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#28. 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
#30. A live unexamined isn't worth living. I will add, A life unlived isn't worth examining.
Oscar Wilde
#31. Mortality means you don't have forever to work things out. You can live your life unexamined but then on the last day you're going to think: 'I've left things a little late.'
Mitch Albom
#32. Plato did claim that the unexamined life was not worth living. Oedipus Rex was not so sure.
Tom Robbins
#33. An unexamined faith is not worth having, for fundamentalism and uncritical certitude entail the rejection of one of the great human gifts: that of free will, of the liberty to make up our own minds based on evidence and tradition and reason.
Jon Meacham
#34. We have so many ideas and beliefs about ourselves. We told ourselves story about what we want and who we are, smart or kind. Often these are the unexamined and limited ideas of others that we have internalized and then gone on to live out
Jack Kornfield
#35. Many useful and valuable books lie buried in shops and libraries, unknown and unexamined, unless some lucky compiler opens them by chance, and finds an easy spoil of wit and learning.
Samuel Johnson
#36. Socrates had it wrong; it is not the unexamined but finally the uncommitted life that is not worth living.
William Sloane Coffin
#37. Dangers lurk in all systems. Systems incorporate the unexamined beliefs of their creators. Adopt a system, accept its beliefs, and you help strengthen the resistance to change
Frank Herbert
#38. And I believe happiness is the exact opposite of sadness, bitterness, and hatred: happiness should remain unexamined as long as possible.
Stephen King
#39. While most would agree with Socrates that, "the unexamined life is not worth living," a lesser-known quote by Sheldon Kopp might be more important here: "The unlived life is not worth examining.
Meg Jay
#40. Friendship is a beautiful blessing. You may love your friends and they may love you, but that doesn't mean they should have unexamined influence in all areas of your life.
Steve Maraboli
#41. The dangers of unexamined and unregulated monopoly power, particularly in the state executive, are hardly news. The right reaction is not passive acquiescence.
Noam Chomsky
#42. When one supports a certain radical position, one should know the conservative position that one is rejecting. What troubles me is the unexamined adoption of a radical stance.
Robert Pincus-Witten
#43. A person must move beyond guilt and unexamined thoughts and motives in order to discover a purpose for living vibrantly.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#44. 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
#45. What do you think Socrates meant when he said, "The unexamined life is not worth living"? Third,
Karen Armstrong
#46. If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?
Paul Kalanithi
#47. So much of our lives are defined by habit or what the guy next to us is doing, never wondering and knowing who and what we support with our actions, from the detergent Mom always used, to my favorite dish I make ... A lot of my life is unexamined habit.
Kristin Bauer Van Straten
#48. It seems to me the better question is whether there's any virtue in committing to a permanent and unexamined certainty.
James S.A. Corey
#49. But in a world where victimhood has become status, souls go unexamined for hardness.
John Ortberg
#50. You have to adhere to a philosophy that the life unexamined is not worth living, because otherwise you're just living from day to day and you don't have any real sense of yourself or where you are.
Tom Hanks
#51. Life unexamined, is not worth living.
Democritus
#52. You are lost because you have not been being honest with yourself, and your life is largely unexamined and unexerted.
Bryant McGill
#53. 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
#54. Why do people do this?'
'Blog, you mean? I don't know ... didn't someone once say the unexamined life isn't worth living?'
'Yeah, Plato,' said Strike, 'but this isn't examining a life, it's exhibiting it.
Robert Galbraith
#55. An unexamined idea, to paraphrase Socrates, is not worth having and a society whose ideas are never explored for possible error may eventually find its foundations insecure.
Mark Van Doren
#56. The ancient Greeks were the first ones to say an unexamined life is not worth living. They don't tell you of course what we found out, an examined life not that fascinating either.
Colin Quinn
#57. While the mass of men went on leading thoroughly unexamined lives of monstrous consumption, Augustus Waters examined the collection of the Rijksmuseum from afar.
John Green
#58. To lead a life so wholly happy, so wholly unexamined that she could be dying, could be betrayed, could be besieged on all sides and never even know it.
Paullina Simons
#59. As Socrates I believe said the unexamined life is not worth living. I believe that's true. I do believe that.
Joy Behar
#60. An unexamined life is not worth living, and an unexamined faith is not worth holding.
Ergun Caner
#61. The whole process of writing is a setting at a distance. That is the value of it - to the writer, and to the people who read the results of this process, which takes the raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general.
Doris Lessing
#62. 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
#63. As we gaze into the mirror it holds up for us, we too easily imagine that what we behold is Nature when in fact we see the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires.
William Cronon
#64. Anger at queries about our beliefs is the body's warning signal: here lies unexamined and probably dangerous doctrinal baggage.
Carl Sagan
#65. What Socrates called the "unexamined life" that is "not worth living" now seems to be the life more people have slipped into than ever before.
Os Guinness
#66. Because our attachment to control is either unexamined or addictive, we do not understand that by relinquishing control and providing choice, we increase our influence and impact many times over.
Roger Harrison
#67. 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
#68. If your goal is to polish up a fake person you can sell to a public you perceive as dumb, the unexamined life will do perfectly well, thank you.
Mary Karr
#69. Socrates once said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." I would expand on his thought by suggesting, "The unexamined society is not worth living in.
Eileen Workman
#70. An unexamined life is a life of no account.
Socrates
#71. Whenever unexamined outlooks come to the surface, surprising things can happen.
Barnet Bain
#72. Generally speaking, writers who have been at it for a while, and who are any good at it, suffer from an acute kind of self-knowledge. The unexamined life is not a risk for them.
Mark Slouka
#73. 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
#74. Socrates said that an unexamined life is not worth living. But you know, an over-examined life can be a real crap festival, too.
Alex Bosworth
#75. William James said, "You cannot travel without until you have travelled within." Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." People who discover their sweet spot are people who take the inward journey and examine themselves. They make the choice to live until they die.
Scott M. Fay
#76. Progress has always been achieved by probing well-entrenched and well-founded forms of life with unpopular and unfounded values. This is how man gradually freed himself from fear and from the tyranny of unexamined systems.
Paul Karl Feyerabend
#77. Unexamined wallpaper is classroom practices and institutional policies that are so entrenched in school culture or a teacher's paradigm that their ability to affect student learning is never probed.
Richard Elmore
#78. Democracy ... .[is not] ... simply a form of government but an organizing principle that bundles individual freedoms, Christianity, and capitalism into a marketable product carrying with it the unexamined promise of wealth and prosperity.
Thomas King
#79. Get yourself healthy before you get yourself married. Too often we bring our unexamined selves into our marriage relationship. Also, have a cultivating commitment to have a quality relationship with each other in your marriage.
Neil Clark Warren
#80. The unexamined life is not worth living. But if all you're doing is examining, then you're not living!
Adam Leipzig
#81. I think that for humans, the most regrettable of omissions, along with unshed tears and unexamined lives, is untold stories, the things not shared, the lost opportunity to be honest about oneself and tender toward others.
Martha M. Moravec
#82. In the American Technopoly, public opinion is a yes or no answer to an unexamined question.
Neil Postman
#83. It may be true that the unexamined life is not worth living-but neither is the unlived life worth examining.
Dan Millman
#84. 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
#85. Skepticism is essential to the quest for knowledge, for it is in the seedbed of puzzlement that genuine inquiry takes root. Without skepticism, we may remain mired in unexamined belief systems that are accepted as sacrosanct yet have no factual basis in reality.
Paul Kurtz
#86. ( ... )while it's true that the unexamined life is not worth living, it's also true that the unlived life isn't worth examining.
Robert McKee
#87. 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
#88. The free person does not live by an unexamined faith. To do so is to worship an idol whittled out and made into a fetish.
James Luther Adams
#89. The most important thing is to be true to yourself, however you feel, and not try to feel or behave differently because you think you should, or someone has told you how you must feel. But do think about it. Unexamined feelings lead to all kinds of trouble.
Garth Nix
#90. Dogs are never in a bad mood over something you said at breakfast. Dogs never sniff at the husks of old conversations, or conduct autopsies on weekends gone wrong. An unexamined life may not be worth living, but the overexamined life is hell. We talk too much.
Abigail Thomas
#91. The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management's unexamined beliefs.
Gary Hamel
#92. Consciousness is the basis of both the examined and the unexamined life.
Sam Harris
#93. So dogma, doctrine, unexamined assumptions, that's what it is to be sharing that, the hippies shadow, no way of grounding it to reality. It's where we're just cut off from reality unless we can argue, we can substantiate, we can justify, we can convince each other.
Rebecca Goldstein
#94. The very essence of leadership is you have a vision. It's got to be a vision you articulate clearly and forcefully on every occasion.
Whatever you value, be committed to it and let nothing distract you from this goal. The uncommitted life, like Plato's unexamined life, is not worth living.
Theodore M. Hesburgh
#95. Look - I understand that an unexamined life is not worth living, but do you think I could someday have an unexamined lunch?
Elizabeth Gilbert
#96. I think I have never known anyone who led quite unexamined a life.
Joan Didion
#97. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the life too closely examined may not be lived at all.
Mark Twain
#98. Psychologists, for reasons of clinical necessity or vagaries of temperament, have chosen to dissect and catalog the morbid emotions - depression, anger, anxiety - and to leave largely unexamined the more vital, positive ones.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#99. 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
