L29 · Lens
Socratic self-examination
Question the belief behind the feeling and test its premises as a philosopher or cognitive therapist would.
Use: Self-deception, recurring patterns, distorted thinking.
Boundary: Disciplined inquiry into premises, not self-attack.
Cues
Showing 20 of 29 cues
“If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.”
“Be tolerant with others and strict with yourself.”
“Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be One.”
“If anyone can refute me; show me I’m making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective; I’ll gladly change. It’s the truth I’m after, and the truth never harmed anyone.”
“If you didn’t learn these things in order to demonstrate them in practice, what did you learn them for?”
“What have I done wrong? What have I done well? What have I omitted that I ought to have done?”
“Is the trigger serving me or am I serving the trigger?”
“Test it this way: you say, “Without using the new word which you have just learned, try to rephrase what you have just learned in your own language.” Without using the word “energy,” tell me what you know now about the dog’s motion.” You cannot. So you learned nothing about science.”
“We take other men’s knowledge and opinions upon trust; which is an idle and superficial learning. We must make them our own. We are just like a man who, needing fire, went to a neighbor’s house to fetch it, and finding a very good one there, sat down to warm himself without remembering to carry any back home. What good does it do us to have our belly full of meat if it is not digested, if it is not transformed into us, if it does not nourish and support us?”
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
“For you see what our discussions are all about - and is there anything about which a man of even small intelligence would be more serious than this: what is the way we ought to live?”
“But whether easy or difficult, Alcibiades, still there is no other way; knowing what we are, we shall know how to take care of ourselves, and if we are ignorant we shall not know.”
“To be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain understanding must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself ... the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.”
“For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
“With all that which a person allows to appear, one may ask: what is it meant to hide? What should it divert the eyes from? ... How far does he deceive himself in this action?”
“Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but don’t consider the beam that is in your own eye?”
“Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say that you’ve wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.”
“Most men are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, frightfully objective sometimes - but the task is precisely to be objective toward oneself and subjective toward all others.”
“There is a certain extra gain in having conquered [inner] territory entirely through one’s own initiative, courage, and perseverance.”
“Experience ... shows beyond any doubt that patients can develop an amazing faculty of keen self-observation if they are bent on understanding their own problems.”