Monday, January 03, 2011

First bon mots of the year

"The unexamined life is not worth living."


?????


"The unlived life is not worth examining."


Froog


I could have sworn I'd used this one before, but a search of the blogs has failed to turn it up.  Perhaps only in a parallel universe?

Even more bizarrely, I can't readily discover who came up with the original quote.  Top Google results are all over the place - variously attributing it to Socrates, Keats, an American psychologist called Sheldon Kopp, and numerous others.  Now it will probably be attributed to Froog, too.  But who the hell said it first?


4 comments:

JES said...

Wikiquote does attribute it to Socrates, or if you want to get technical, to Plato, in his Apology, 37e-38a. (No direct link to that line, but go here and scroll down a little.)

I know, I know: Wikianything almost by definition won't be authoritative. But it seems an unlikely bit of forgery!

Froog said...

It was ringing distant bells, but I can't for the life of me recall the original Greek. It is nearly 30 years now since I was reading Plato in the original, I suppose.

Froog said...

Ah, strange - I was replying there to a comment from JES which I found in my 'Blog Comments' e-mail folder.... but doesn't seem to have appeared here. What's up with that, JES? Did you withdraw the remark?

Froog said...

Aha, there's the missing comment from JES.

Who knew Blogger had a 'spam folder'?!

Not me! Might be a new feature. Seems a little redundant, when I have a 'comment notification' set up to one of my e-mail accounts which allows fairly prompt post facto 'moderation'. (And could they not flag comments as "intercepted as spam" when they forward them to me there? That would kind of make sense, surely?)