A system of morality that is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception that has nothing sound in it and nothing true.
SocratesRead
An unexamined life is a life of no account.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Living without self-reflection can lead to a meaningless existence.
Socrates highlights the importance of introspection, suggesting that failing to examine one's life can result in an existence that lacks purpose and significance. By encouraging people to reflect on their values, decisions, and the overall direction of their lives, he implies that true fulfillment comes from understanding oneself and one’s experiences.
Themes
Self-ReflectionPurposeIntrospectionExistenceMeaning
In practice
Example use cases
During a philosophy lecture discussing the importance of self-awareness.
More from Socrates
All quotes →The poets are only the interpreters of the gods.
SocratesRead
I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know.
SocratesRead
The unexamined life is not worth living.
SocratesRead
When I was young, I believed that life might unfold in an orderly way, according to my hopes and expectations. But now I understand that the Way winds like a river, always changing, ever onward.. My journeys revealed that the Way itself creates the warrior; that every path leads to peace, every choice to wisdom. And that life has always been, and will always be, arising in Mystery.
SocratesRead
Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued." "It is not living that matters, but living rightly. The unexamined life is not worth living.
SocratesRead
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I don't think there's such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.
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Her own misery filled her heart—there was no room in it for other people's sorrow.
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The joke of it all is that you are looking from your true nature right now without knowing it. If you would stop being fascinated with the contents of your mind, you would experience what I am saying. Feel your way into what I am saying rather than thinking about it. Only a self-concept looks and longs for God. Drop your self-concept and there is only God meeting God. Enlightenment is the restoration of cosmic humor.
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The purpose of prayer is emphatically not to bend God's will to ours, but rather to align our will to his.
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I feel impelled to speak today in a language that in a sense is new-one which I, who have spent so much of my life in the military profession, would have preferred never to use. That new language is the language of atomic warfare.
Dwight D. EisenhowerRead
The most consequential change in man's view of the world, of living nature and of himself came with the introduction, over a period of some 100 years beginning only in the 18th century, of the idea of change itself, of change over periods of time: in a word, of evolution.
Ernst MayrRead