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Quotes to Live By -- The Unexamined Life

By Ben Mester

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Published: 09Feb2010
Word count: 513
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There's an ancient Greek quote to live by that I've always strongly connected with. It was a simple command etched into stone on one of their buildings, the Oracle at Delphi. The command was simply "Know Thyself." When I first read that quote, I didn't really understand what it was saying. How can a person not know themselves, I wondered? But slowly, as I began to mature into a man, it started making sense. And then I came across another quote, this one also attributed to the ancient Greeks, to Socrates himself, which cemented the idea in my mind. He said:

The unexamined life is not worth living

When I read that as a younger man, it really caused me to take a look at life in different terms. I began to realize, society has a plan and a course for each one of us. In today's world, a person goes to college, gets a good job, spends the next 30 years of his life buying himself a place to sleep, has 2.5 children, and most likely a divorce. That is the simple path that modern society wants each of us to aspire to. But I wanted something more than that. Once I read this quote from Socrates, I no longer simply wanted to blindly walk the path set out in front of me by the society of the day. And once I began to study and explore the different facets of life, I began to understand what it meant to know myself. And I came across another saying in the book of Proverbs in the Bible that echoes the words of Socrates:

The wisdom of the prudent is to give thought to their ways

In a recent book, an author David Straker describes how, becoming adults, before we really have much experience with the world, human beings are what he describes as unconsciously incompetent. We don't really know how to do a whole lot, and what's worse, we don't even understand how much we really don't know about life and the world around us. But as we progress, we transition from a state of unconscious incompetence, to a state conscious incompetence where we at last realize all the things we really don't know. We finally sit down to really understand ourselves, to understand life and explore the things in life that are really worth doing. I think of another quote by Confucius:

To know that you don't know what you don't know, that is true wisdom

It's interesting, before I spent time getting to know myself, I thought I had the world figured out. But as I sat down to really explore life, I realized just how much I was missing as a human being. I suppose that's a good thing though. Humility is definitely a pathway to wisdom and to God. Maybe that's the whole point in the end. Maybe the greatest wisdom is just to have a learning spirit and be open to wisdom. I like that thought.

I hope you enjoyed another of my favorite quotes to live by from the ancient world. Socrates unexamined life is one of the foundations in my life. I hope you found it meaningful.

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