Socrates and Thoreau are two well-respected philosophers in history that led many people to question their normal, day-to-day lives. In Thoreau’s book Walden, Thoreau moves into a small cottage in the middle of the woods, he built by himself off minimal supplies. By doing so, Thoreau experiences the bare necessities of life and what is really needed. Socrates, in Plato’s Euthyphro and Apology, questions the acceptance of life and realizes that one should challenge what they hear to grasp the understanding of life. Socrates and Thoreau possess many different aspects of an excellent life and have the ability to discuss with each other by agreeing that a person should not follow the status quo. Furthermore, to not just accept something because that is how you were raised and to search for your own excellent life in this world but these philosophers would disagree on how their idea of an excellent…show more content… In Thoreau’s own words he entered the woods because: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” (Thoreau 97). Thoreau realizes through his adventures that he has not yet learned the meaning of life, until he has lived off the bare necessities. Socrates also believes one does not know everything until they question what they are told. Socrates questions when people call him the wisest: “I am called wise because my listeners always imagine I possess the wisdom which I do not find in other” (Biffle 37). On Socrates’ adventures he searches for a man wiser than him and even the poets or politicians, he discovers are not wise either; he is the wisest. Both of Thoreau and Socrates adventures, help them discover the interpersonal question they have of life itself without just accepting what others tell