Echo
The examined life
Socrates makes self-knowledge a condition of a life worth living. The later lines ask what the examination costs, and whether looking is already a way of changing.
1 · Socrates
The unexamined life is not worth living.Montaigne turns the examination toward death, which is where most philosophy gets evasive.
2 · Michel de Montaigne
To philosophize is to learn how to die.Thoreau wants the same honesty applied to an ordinary Tuesday, not only to the last hour.
3 · Henry David Thoreau
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.Baldwin refuses the comfort of an unexamined country. What you will not face, you cannot change.
4 · James Baldwin
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.