A Quote by Saul Bellow

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

Quote Topics

Alternative Dead Examined Life Given Life Life Is Life Is Not Worth Living Living Makes Over Rather Said Unexamined Life Were Wish Wish You Worth Worth Living

Quote Author

Saul Bellow
American - Writer
June 10, 1915 - April 5, 2005

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

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. My dad said, Booty - mmm mmm.

Christopher Titus

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

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

William Sloane Coffin

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

Mark Twain

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.

Socrates

Europe's leaders need to sit down with Socrates for a night; a life unexamined is not worth living. We have to remember that, as he says, the pursuit of wealth should never be at the expense of wisdom.

Bettany Hughes

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

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

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

Elizabeth Gilbert

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

Ergun Caner

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

Adam Leipzig

We think the way we do partly because Socrates thought the way he did. His basic idea - that the unexamined life is not worth living - is what it means to live in the modern world, to develop ideas and ask questions.

Bettany Hughes

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