Unexamined Quotes & Sayings

My house was built by a partnership called Desire and Ignorance; they often work together, and always with disastrous consequences. It's surprising they aren't more talked of in the press. They are great survivors but incompetent builders. Desire is famous only for pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain, while Ignorance casts a veil over all his unexamined assumptions and makes wrong ones every hour. Together, they created the psychological reality where I live. Hardly a surprise, therefore, if it's unfit for purpose! — Simon Parke

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

You are lost because you have not been being honest with yourself, and your life is largely unexamined and unexerted. — Bryant McGill

Persistent problems, however unpleasant they may seem, contain the unprocessed and unexamined thoughts and feelings that, if left alone, keep you from your greatness. That's why the pain, emptiness, and longing you feel can be your greatest gift - it can motivate you to examine parts of yourself that have been overlooked, forgotten, or hidden. It's the irritant of sand in the oyster, which is the impetus for the pearl. In walking the conscious life path, you reveal your deepest Reality, layer by layer. You come home. — Jennifer Howard

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

Hakomi is a path taken by those who work to go beyond the half remembered hurts and failed beliefs that linger unexamined in the mind and body, hurts that act through barely conscious habits and reactions. This work is a part of that heroic labor, a cousin to sitting meditation, to singing bowls and chanting monks. — Ron Kurtz

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

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

I think I have never known anyone who led quite unexamined a life. — Joan Didion

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

A live unexamined isn't worth living. I will add, A life unlived isn't worth examining. — Oscar Wilde

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

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

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

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

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

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

We send one species to the butcher and give our love and kindness to another apparently for no reason other than because it's the way things are. When our attitudes and behaviors toward animals are so inconsistent, and this inconsistency is so unexamined, we can safely say we have been fed absurdities. — Melanie Joy

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

The philosopher Socrates said, "An unexamined life is not worth living." If a common philosopher could think that, how much more we Christians ought to listen to the Holy Spirit when He says, "Examine yourself." An unexamined Christian lies like an unattended garden. Let your garden go unattended for a few months, and you will not have roses and tomatoes but weeds. An unexamined Christian life is like an unkempt house. Lock your house up as tight as you will and leave it long enough, and when you come back you will not believe the dirt that got in from somewhere. An unexamined Christian is like an untaught child. A child that is not taught will be a little savage. It takes examination, teaching, instruction, discipline, caring, tending, weeding and cultivating to keep the life right. — A.W. Tozer

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

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

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

In the unexamined American Dream rhetoric promoting mass higher education in the nation of my youth, the implicit vision was that one day everyone, or at least practically everyone, would be a manager or a professional. We would use the most elitist of all means, scholarship, toward the most egalitarian of ends. We would all become chiefs; hardly anyone would be left a mere Indian. — William A. Henry III

5Our standard of living, our very survival here, is based upon raw exploitation of working-class women - white black, and third world - in all parts of the world. Our hands are not clean. We must also come to terms with the that still largely unexamined, undisclosed faith in the idea of America, that no matter how unbearable it is here, it is better than anywhere else; that's slippage between third world and third rate. We eat bananas. Buy flowers. Use salt to flavour our food. Drink sweetened coffee. Use tires for the cars we drive. Depend upon state-of-the-art electronics. Travel. We consume and rely upon multiple choice to reify consumption. All those things that give material weight to idea of America - conflating capitalism and democracy, demarcating 'us' from 'them'. — M. Jacqui Alexander

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

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

What do you think Socrates meant when he said, "The unexamined life is not worth living"? Third, — Karen Armstrong

Young children begin very early to internalize information that either encourages or discourages self-disclosure. Cues are intuitively understood. Most of what we feel is unexamined and articulated. Cultural norms are unwittingly absorbed. We learn when to speak and when to stay silent. - Pam MacRae (Ch. 2) — Rosalie De Rosset

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

( ... )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

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

He does not look at the dancers, does not acknowledge her, sitting and staring. He is steeped in a private aural world. He drew out longer notes than her papa ever had; he was more forceful with the bow; she hadn't known the violin contained such wildness. She was reminded of the tarantella, which skipped along its notes and pulled you upward; out of yourself, come and play! But these pieces, these tangos, didn't only lift; they also plunged you downward, deep inside yourself, to the unexamined corners of your heart. Come, they whispered, come and look, see what's here and dance with it, this is music too. — Carolina De Robertis

Who would be so base as to pick on a wizened, shriveled old lady, well stricken in years, who has consecrated her entire life to the needy and the destitute? On the other hand, who would be so incurious as to leave unexamined the influence and motives of a woman who once boasted of operating more than five hundred convents in upward of 105 countries - "without counting India"? Lone self-sacrificing zealot, or chair of a missionary multinational? The scale alters with the perspective, and the perspective alters with the scale. — Christopher Hitchens

Shame That Destroys Employing shame to control people, however, is a misuse of power. When Gandhi was asked how so few British could control the enormous numbers of Indian citizens, he replied, "They humiliate us to control us." So it is with anyone who intentionally, or out of deep and unexamined old learning controls another by means of humiliation. Sharp anger, a searing jibe at someone's very essence, name-calling, setting someone apart as unacceptable, rejection, all of these behaviors and many more render others helpless. This is the aberration of shame from which so many of us must work to release ourselves. — Jean Illsley Clarke

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

An unexamined life is not worth living, and an unexamined faith is not worth holding. — Ergun Caner

Jefferson believed in the future, and why not? His own lifetime was testament to the possibility of political and intellectual progress. The past, he thought, should hold no magical, unexamined claim over the present. "Some men look at Constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them, like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched," he wrote in 1816.40 They — Jon Meacham

When you're operating on uninvestigated theories of what's going on and you aren't even aware of it, you're in what I call "the dream." Often the dream becomes troubling; sometimes it even turns into a nightmare. At times like these, you may want to test the truth of your theories by doing The Work on them. The Work always leaves you with less of your uncomfortable story. Who would you be without it? How much of your world is made up of unexamined stories? You'll never know until you inquire. — Byron Katie

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

Plato did claim that the unexamined life was not worth living. Oedipus Rex was not so sure. — Tom Robbins

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

Socrates had it wrong; it is not the unexamined but finally the uncommitted life that is not worth living. — William Sloane Coffin

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

The pro-psychedelic plant position is clearly an antidrugs position. Drug dependencies are the result of habitual, unexamined, and obsessive behavior; these are precisely the tendencies in our psychological makup that the psychedelics mitigate. The plant hallucinogens dissolve habits and hold motivations up to inspection by a wider, less egocentric, and more grounded point of view within the individual. — Terence McKenna

We're all members of one tribe or another - bonded by culture, family, religion, class, education, employment, team affiliation, or any number of other criteria. An essential first step in discerning the cultural from the human is what mythologist Joseph Campbell called detribalization. We have to recognize the various tribes we belong to and begin extricating ourselves from the unexamined assumptions each of them mistakes for the truth. — Christopher Ryan

I don't live my life wondering how to live my life. — Marty Rubin

Know Thyself. It's good advice. Know yourself. You are worth knowing. Examine your life. The unexamined life is not worth living. Be aware that other people have equal significance. Give them the space to make their own choices, and let their choices count as you want them to let your choices count. Remember that excellence has no stopping point and keep on pursuing it. Make art that can last and that says something nobody else can say. Live the best life you can, and become the best self you can. You cannot know which of your actions is the lever that will move worlds. Not even Necessity knows all ends. Know yourself. — Jo Walton

As Socrates I believe said the unexamined life is not worth living. I believe that's true. I do believe that. — Joy Behar

I love you, but I hate your overeating" doesn't help a marriage. It's not helpful because hatred is a powerful emotion (a posture, really) that is not easy to wield or maintain carefully. Hatred is more a bludgeon than a scalpel. Our ability to distinguish sin from sinner, especially in others, is so limited, so vulnerable to our own unexamined subjectivity. — Ken Wilson

Our return to an image-based culture means the destruction of the abstract thought made possible by a literate, print-based society. Image-based societies do not grasp or cope with ambiguity, nuance, doubt and the many layers of irrational motives and urges, some of them frightening, that make human actions complex and finally unfathomable. They eschew self-criticism for amusement. They build fantastic non-reality-based belief systems that cater to human desires and illusions rather than human reality. These illusions, whether religious or secular, offer a simple and unexamined myth that the human race is advancing morally, spiritually and materially toward paradise. This advance is proclaimed as inevitable. This faith in our advancement makes us passive and complacent. — Chris Hedges

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

Life is worth living but not worth thinking about — Marty Rubin

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

An unexamined life is a life of no account. — Socrates

The unexamined life is not worth living. But if all you're doing is examining, then you're not living! — Adam Leipzig

The longing provoked by the brochure was an example , at once touching and pathetic, of how projects (and even whole lives) might be influenced by the simplest and most unexamined images of happiness; of how a lengthy and ruinously expensive journey might be set in motion by nothing more than the sigh of a photograph of a palm tree gently inclining in a tropical breeze. I resolved to travel to the island of Barbados. — Alain De Botton

Whenever unexamined outlooks come to the surface, surprising things can happen. — Barnet Bain

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

A person must move beyond guilt and unexamined thoughts and motives in order to discover a purpose for living vibrantly. — Kilroy J. Oldster

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

If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you. In short, entertainment fulfills our expectations. Art, on the other hand, makes no compromise for public taste as it inspires us to consider life's complexities and ambiguities. Art is the opposition testing the strength of societal and cultural values-values that are thoughtlessly adopted by the mass of individuals living unexamined lives and all who cannot imagine a different way of seeing life. — William Missouri Downs

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

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

Even though in principle we may "know better", we routinely succumb all the same to the incessant, often frantic and unexamined busyness of thinking we have to get somewhere else first before we can rest; thinking we need to get certain things done to feel we have accomplished something before we can be happy. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

But in a world where victimhood has become status, souls go unexamined for hardness. — John Ortberg

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

If we are living under the assumption that we are only one way or another, inside a limited spectrum of human qualities, then we would have to question why more of us aren't wholly satisfied with our lives right now. Why do we have access to so much wisdom yet fail to have the strength and courage to act upon our good intentions by making powerful choices? And most important, why do we continue to act out in ways that go against our value system and all that we stand for? We will assert that it is because of our unexamined life, our darker self, our shadow self where our unclaimed power lies — Deepak Chopra

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

It made her chest hurt, how much she felt in this moment. She knew she should not say anything impetuously. But under the light of the stained glass window, the flickering candlelight of their shared memories, it felt like simple unexamined honesty. No matter what the darkness brought back to her tomorrow.
I'm in love with you. — Joey W. Hill

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

For each of us as women, there is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, beautiful and tough as chestnut stanchions against our nightmare of weakness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling — Audre Lorde

Consciousness is the basis of both the examined and the unexamined life. — Sam Harris

Life unexamined, is not worth living. — Democritus

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

Sleep is where we touch what is better left unexamined. There, the whole of life is bundled up, dwindled. There the carefully hoarded and enjoyed personality, our only treasure and at the same time our only defense must die into the ultimate truth of things, the black lightning that splits and destroys all, the positive, unquestionable nothingness. — William Golding

The biggest barriers to strategic renewal are almost always top management's unexamined beliefs. — Gary Hamel

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

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

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

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

The champions of militant Islam are, of course, misogynists, woman-haters; they are also misologists
haters of reason. Their armed doctrine is little more than a chaotic penal code underscored by impotent dreams of genocide. And, like all religions, it is a massive agglutination of stock response, of cliches, of inherited and unexamined formulations. — Martin Amis

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

Anger at queries about our beliefs is the body's warning signal: here lies unexamined and probably dangerous doctrinal baggage. — Carl Sagan

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

A critique does not consist in saying that things aren't good the way they are. It consists in seeing on just what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established and unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based ... To do criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy. — Michel Foucault

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

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

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

In the American Technopoly, public opinion is a yes or no answer to an unexamined question. — Neil Postman

These technical impediments [ ... things like ignorance, impatience, unexamined assumptions, habit ... ] get in the way of what would otherwise occur or develop quite naturally, such as wakefulness, awareness, inspiration and infallible intuition. Things that should be our birth right. This preliminary stage, then, we call learning how to learn. — H.M. Forester

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

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

If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining? — Paul Kalanithi

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

Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Perhaps it's time to inventory the imprints and anchors in our own life. Even if they once were completely reasonable, are they still reasonable? Once the old choices are reconsidered, we can open ourselves to new decisions-and the new opportunities of a new day. — Dan Ariely

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

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

These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman's place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep. — Audre Lorde

I greatly enjoyed these studies. Geshe Rabten communicated the ideas clearly and succinctly, then had us divide into pairs to pick apart in debate the details of what he had just taught. This was an excellent intellectual discipline. It made me aware of how much of my thinking was muddled. Without subjecting one's ideas to such scrutiny, it is easy and reassuring to cherish opinions that, in the end, are found to rest on the sloppiest of unexamined assumptions. This — Stephen Batchelor