Ancient Greek · c. 470–399 BCE
Socrates
The unexamined life is not worth living.
Meaning is found through the courage to question — including one's own beliefs about what matters.
Every thinker worth reading has one true sentence. This is a place to find Socrates's.
On meaning
Meaning is found through the courage to question — including one's own beliefs about what matters.
Why this thinker still matters
The specific circumstances of Socrates's life are gone. The questions they wrestled with are not. Reading them now is less like consulting an authority and more like sitting across from someone who has already done a lot of the hard work of thinking.
Key insights
- ◆Read the primary sources when you can, not summaries of summaries.
- ◆Distinguish what the thinker actually wrote from what they are commonly quoted as saying.
- ◆Notice which of their answers resonate — that is data about you as much as about them.
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