Quotes & Sayings About Unexamined Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My first life fled without a fight and left nothing behind, so I doubt it was a loss worth mourning. A man I don't remember mixed genes with a woman I can't recall, and I was called to the stage. I stumbled through the curtain, squinting into the blinding light of the birth canal, and after a brief and banal performance, I died.
This is the arc of the average life - unexamined, unremarked, unremarkable - and it should have ended there. In simpler times, life was a one-act play, and when it was over we took our bows and caught our roses and enjoyed any applause we earned, then the spotlight faded and we shuffled backstage to nibble crackers in the greenroom of eternity. — Isaac Marion

The first thing to understand about nutritionism is that it is not the same thing as nutrition. As the "-ism" suggests, it is not a scientific subject but an ideology. Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it's still exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a little like the weather
all pervasive and so virtually impossible to escape. Still, we can try. — Michael Pollan

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

The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through. Most people had not lived
nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died
through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain. The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not had had ever, really, been present at his life. — James Baldwin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life unexamined, is not worth living. — Democritus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

( ... )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

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

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

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

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

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