Personal Quotation Essay: College Admission Essay Sample

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” -Socrates

As a Philosophy major, perhaps it is of little surprise that I chose this quotation. Nevertheless, I do believe it conveys better than any other who I am and what I value. If Socrates was at all correct in his assertion, then I vainly suppose my life is quite worth living. In every way, I believe myself to be a philosopher—an odd claim, no doubt, for any college student to make. And yet I think it is not; and I believe those who know me best would agree. For even into the most leisurely settings, I inject my examinations of life and its purpose, of ethics and God. While my roommate plays mix tapes of Lil’ Wayne, I retaliate with audio books of Nietzsche or BBC radio clips of Bertrand Russell (although I do like Lil’ Wayne). My ponderings seem susceptible to no context or setting; neither to breakfast nor dinner, nor the treadmill or my bed before sleep. The very last conversation with my mother was the teleological approach of Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics. And with my father, a lecture on Aquinas’ Summa Theologica. Perhaps it is worth noting that my mother could, only with great difficulty spell ‘Aristotle,’ and as for my father, he would be fortunate to place the life of Aquinas in the correct millennium.

Since childhood, I have been both contemplative and passionate. It was not, however, until my later years of high school that I began to gain a great passion for the art of thinking itself. Perhaps one of the very first instances of this came in my junior year, when my Religious Studies teacher so boldly endeavored to give his own proofs for God’s existence. They were indeed quite horrible. Thereafter, I could not help but reflect on what I considered the egregious lack of reason he employed or on the subject matter itself to which he applied such a dogmatic approach. After many nights of intense thought I constructed my own proof of sorts, with an opposing conclusion—that God in fact did not exist. Although it was both rigorously devised and quite thorough in its premises—its length being around two pages—my purpose lay not in its conclusion. In fact, at that time, my own personal opinion would have led me more to agreement with my teacher than dissent from him. Instead, what I had perceived was a grave threat to the ideal I was beginning to adopt and hold dear: that above all, truth was the greatest thing a person could attain and that proper reasoning was the sole means of its attainment.

The preceding anecdote is just one of many that could relate the kind of person I am. In my Senior year of high school, I would often vacillate from wall to wall in the corridor of my dormitory, reading the original Latin text of Ovid’s Metamorphoses before sleep. When I attended college in New York City, I would ride the subway for hours sometimes on weekend nights, or pace the banks of the East River, considering a particular philosophical topic inspired either by class or conceived of by my own accord. And when I first came to my present school, I took it upon myself to find a replacement for my old sanctuaries of thought—now the austere book stacks of the Philosophy library. But if you would think that I am a recluse, or a hermit of sorts as a result of my intense love for thinking, you could not be more astray from the truth. For like Socrates, with whose words I began this essay, I often seek to reason dialectically; even sometimes with quite unexpected people. There is likely no better example of this than the hour-long conversation on Existentialism I had with a Dell Technical Support agent, just after he helped me with my laptop. A week later, I conversed with one of my roommates, a Neuroscience major attending Harvard Medical School next fall, about the correlation of God’s nature to meta-ethics. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this ended-up more a debate with myself than with him, as he seemed at first lost and then (maybe as a result) indifferent. Nevertheless, all things considered, I think Socrates would be proud.