The Unexamined Life Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. As Socrates I believe said the unexamined life is not worth living. I believe that's true. I do believe that.

Joy Behar

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?

Paul Kalanithi

#11. What do you think Socrates meant when he said, "The unexamined life is not worth living"? Third,

Karen Armstrong

#12. 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

#13. Plato did claim that the unexamined life was not worth living. Oedipus Rex was not so sure.

Tom Robbins

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. The unexamined life is not worth living. But if all you're doing is examining, then you're not living!

Adam Leipzig

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

Dan Millman

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. Consciousness is the basis of both the examined and the unexamined life.

Sam Harris

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

Mark Twain

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. ( ... )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

#25. Life is worth living but not worth thinking about

Marty Rubin

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. I don't live my life wondering how to live my life.

Marty Rubin

#30. Socrates had it wrong; it is not the unexamined but finally the uncommitted life that is not worth living.

William Sloane Coffin

#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. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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