“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Even though he spent much of his life looking outward, Socrates was a great believer in the practice of self-reflection. Like the saying goes: A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots. This is to say that if you don't learn from your past (mistakes and failures) you will continue to repeat yourself, never growing in the way which is uniquely human. Socrates believed this so unequivocally that he tells us that if you aren't taking the time to contemplate and reflect on your current state that you might as well be dead. Despite being rather extreme, we could likely gain a lot by adopting this teaching of his in the world today. With the number of distractions available to us at the highest it's ever been, we spend almost no time looking at our own life or reflecting on our past. Online videos, smart phone apps, radio, books, TV, digital music downloads, magazines, social networks and, in general, consumerism, compete for the limited amount of hours we have available each day.
“To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.”
This is really one of my favorite quotes by Socrates. In this quote he is telling us that we should keep our mind open to new ideas and never stop learning, for once we do, once we think that we know everything and no longer need any other information or knowledge and that is a dangerous situation. The reason people have been looking for the "secret of life" forever is because the secret is as big as all of life itself. The amount that we actually know compared to what we may know in the future is so small and insignificant that we might as well say that we know nothing at all.
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