Top 45 The Examined Life Quotes
#1. Philosophers should be, as Seneca put it, 'lawyers for humanity'. Make what you think and feel count; the examined life has global dimensions.
Martha C. Nussbaum
#2. 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
#3. Contemporary philosophy illustrates Hegel's dictum that philosophy is its own time apprehended in thought, for in our age philosophy yields to the objectifying technical impulse and loses its ancient task of pursuing the Socratic ideal of the wisdom of the examined life.
Donald Phillip Verene
#4. Self-doubt was a luxury, as, perhaps, was the examined life. And yet the examined life, as the adage had it, was the only life worth living.
Alexander McCall Smith
#5. Emerson, I am trying to live, as you said we must, the examined life. But there are days I wish there was less in my head to examine, not to speak of the busy heart.
Mary Oliver
#6. I believe that the interior life is the same for all of us. And because they're steeped in faith, Irish-American Catholics are a people who have a language for the examined life.
Alice McDermott
#7. In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius pointed out a very central truth concerning the examined life. That is, that the man of science who concerns himself solely with science, who cannot enjoy and be enriched by art, is a misshapen man. An incomplete man.
William Styron
#9. If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.
Thomas Ligotti
#10. The examined life has always been pretty well confined to a privileged class.
Edgar Friedenberg
#11. The examined life is the only life worth living.
Socrates
#12. Human knowledge is one thing, human wellbeing another. There is no predetermined harmony between the two. The examined life may not be worth living.
John N. Gray
#13. Living simply is not about living in poverty or self-inflicted deprivation. It's about living an examined life where one has determined what is truly important and enough ... and then just let go of all the rest.
Duane Elgin
#14. Life, as he conceived of it, was a long decline from a glorious past, and if a reader approaches a newspaper in that spirit, he can find much to confirm him in his belief, particularly if he has never examined any short period of the past in day-to-day detail.
Robertson Davies
#15. It's the desire to study the human condition, the desire for collaboration, to learn and absorb, and to lead a well-examined life.
Nicole Kidman
#17. We all know that the un-examined life is not worth living (socrates). But if all you are doing is examining, you are not living.
Adam Leipzig
#18. The current memoir craze has fostered the belief that confession is therapeutic, that therapy is redemptive and that redemption equals art, and it has encouraged the delusion that candor, daring and shamelessness are substitutes for craft, that the exposed life is the same thing as an examined one.
Michiko Kakutani
#19. 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
#20. Men of Athens, I honor and I love you, but I will obey the god rather than you and as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practice philosophy, to exhort you and in my usual way to point out to any one of you whom I happen to meet.
Plato
#21. 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
#22. It is told that Buddha, going out to look on life, was greatly daunted by death. "They all eat one another!" he cried, and called it evil. This process I examined, changed the verb and said, "They all feed one another," and called it good.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#23. The cross is going to judge everything in your life: your eating, your drinking, your sleeping, your spending, your talking. Everything is cross-examined!
Leonard Ravenhill
#24. I have examined all religions, as well as my narrow sphere, my straightened means, and my busy life, would allow; and the result is that the Bible is the best Book in the world. It contains more philosophy than all the libraries I have seen.
John Adams
#25. Dost thou know what life is, my child? Hast thou comprehended the action of those springs which produce existence? Hast thou examined thyself?
Jules Verne
#26. Simple living is about being authentic and living an examined life and if you've thought about the values you want to live by, be confident and stick with them no matter what others around you are doing.
Rhonda Hetzel
#27. I make small mistakes every day. But major mistakes? It doesn't seem so. I've examined my service to the Tibetan people and to humanity, and I've done as much as I can in my life.
Dalai Lama
#28. Also, after Examined Life was finished I found myself thinking about the way creative opportunities and distribution channels were shifting. Should I be showing my films in theaters or just think about getting them out online? There were other issues, too.
Astra Taylor
#29. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the life too closely examined may not be lived at all.
Mark Twain
#30. 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
#31. His priorities for a rich and contented life were friendship, freedom, the pleasures of an examined life, and enough food and shelter to keep body and soul together.
Roger Housden
#32. When you have examined all the illusions of life and know that there isn't any reality, but you nevertheless go on, then you are a mature human being. You accept the idea that it is all mask and illusion and that people are in disguise. You see the crumbl
Marguerite Young
#33. The over examined life, Claire, it's not worth living.
Colum McCann
#34. I've always been impelled to say the truth. When I was 14, in 1954, I already wrote a gay novel, though I'd never read one. I felt that life handed me a great subject, gay life, that had scarcely been examined, and I was impelled to record it in all its strange detail.
Edmund White
#35. Linda Svendsen's 'Marine Life' was important. I was nearly 22. Larry Mathews discussed the book in a creative writing class. We examined her stories, figured out how they worked.
Michael Winter
#36. Consciousness is the basis of both the examined and the unexamined life.
Sam Harris
#37. You can't dissect a joy without killing it.
Marty Rubin
#38. If the Great Physician examined your life, what do you think His diagnosis would be concerning your spiritual life?
Jonah Books
#39. The place of the arts in the classroom is essential in encouraging invention, ambition, and an understanding of the importance and pleasures of living an examined life,
Barbara Kruger
#40. A brutal, relentless self-analysis lies at the heart of all despair.
Marty Rubin
#41. Nevertheless, in the impenetrable solitude of decrepitude she had such a clairvoyance as she examined the most insignificant happenings in the family that for the first time she saw clearly the truths that her busy life in former times had prevented her from seeing.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#42. It is, of course, necessary to have rules and procedures if we wish to accomplish large and complex tasks, but the question of whether or not it is worth the cost must be perennially re-examined. (117)
Sheldon B. Kopp
#43. Yeah, leading an examined life, I always say, is a pain in the ass. It adds an element of complexity to business that most businessmen don't want to hear about. They just want to call a fabric manufacturer, and say, "Hey, give us 10,000 yards of shirting."
Yvon Chouinard
#44. The life which is not examined is not worth living.
Plato
#45. The doctors who have examined me say I am healthy enough for a long life, so don't have any illusions that I'll soon leave this world.
Tomas Borge
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