Top 84 Rebecca Goldstein Quotes
#1. A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world.
Rebecca Goldstein
#2. The opposite of a plain truth, Neils Bohr liked to repeat, is a plain falsehood. But the opposite of a deep truth is another deep truth.
Rebecca Goldstein
#3. Philosophical thinking that doesn't do violence to one's settled mind is no philosophical thinking at all.
Rebecca Goldstein
#4. We need science. We need empirical evidence. We can't just use mathematical reasoning to deduce the nature of the world.
Rebecca Goldstein
#5. Youth is not an essential, but rather an accidental property. Nobody is in essence young. One either ceases to be or ceases to be young.
Rebecca Goldstein
#6. As Plato: We become more worthy the more we bend our minds to the impersonal. We become better as we take in the universe, thinking more about the largeness that it is and laugh about the smallness that is us.
Rebecca Goldstein
#7. Answers? Forget answers. The spectacle is all in the questions.
Rebecca Goldstein
#8. This is the pedagogical paradox. The person and the teacher is required precisely because the knowledge itself is nontransferable from teacher to student.
Rebecca Goldstein
#9. Blau suffered from a mild form of messianism, an ailment as common among Jewish males as nearsightedness. (p. 264)
Rebecca Goldstein
#11. I am beautiful for a brainy woman, brainy for a beautiful woman, but objectively speaking, neither beautiful nor brainy.
Rebecca Goldstein
#12. Philosophical progress is invisible because it is incorporated into our points of view. What was tortuously secured by complex argument becomes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance. We don't see it, because we see with it.
Rebecca Goldstein
#13. One evangelical scientist who had felt his doubts falling away from him when he was hiking in the mountains and came upon a frozen waterfall - in fact a trinity of a frozen waterfall, with three parts to it. At that moment, I felt my resistance leave me. And it was a great sense of relief.
Rebecca Goldstein
#14. The secret of the demagogue is to appear as dumb as his audience so that these people can believe themselves as smart as he is.
Rebecca Goldstein
#15. Plato's concern is not just an intellectual issue, but it is knitted with emotional life as well.
Rebecca Goldstein
#16. I think the humanities always have to take science, our great knowledge that we get from science, into account, but then try to answer the human questions and try to make sense out of our lives, taking into account all of the scientific knowledge.
Rebecca Goldstein
#17. Having your husband at a party is like adding anchovies to a salad. I love anchovies, but you can't taste anything else.
Rebecca Goldstein
#18. So dogma, doctrine, unexamined assumptions, that's what it is to be sharing that, the hippies shadow, no way of grounding it to reality. It's where we're just cut off from reality unless we can argue, we can substantiate, we can justify, we can convince each other.
Rebecca Goldstein
#19. Almost everybody thinks about philosophy, even if they don't realize it's philosophy and even if they have no sense of the difficulty of the problems, the array of possible answers.
Rebecca Goldstein
#20. The will to matter is at least as important as the will to believe.
Rebecca Goldstein
#21. One of the peculiar features of philosophical questions is how eager people are to offer solutions that miss the point of the questions. Sometimes these failed solutions are scientific, and sometimes they are religious, and sometimes they are based on what is called plain common sense.
Rebecca Goldstein
#22. The only object we truly possess is our own mind. The only pleasure over which we have complete dominion is the progress of our own understanding.
Rebecca Goldstein
#23. Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldn't be prepared to make for other people.
Rebecca Goldstein
#24. What is it precisely, that they are doing when they are doing science. Are they refining their instruments for observation or discovering new aspects of reality?
Rebecca Goldstein
#25. Our failures in charity are chained to a narrowed vision of the world that makes too much of the differences between us, and this is our enslavement.
Rebecca Goldstein
#26. As Plato: It is an essential feature of the just state that the wealthy be kept away from political power and that the politically powerful be kept away from wealth.
Rebecca Goldstein
#27. Philosophical progress changes what we take to be "intuitively" obvious, and this change covers up the tracks of the laborious arguments that preceded the changes. We don't see these changes, because we see with them.
Rebecca Goldstein
#28. We must believe that he will come but never believe that he is come. There is no Messiah but an uncome Messiah.
Rebecca Goldstein
#29. To matter ... Is there any human will deeper than that? ... We don't want to live when we become convinced that we don't, can't, will never matter ... We no sooner discover that we are than we desperately want that which we are to matter.
Rebecca Goldstein
#30. To matter, to mind ... What we mind is in our power, but whether we matter may not be - and there's the tragedy ... Can anyone truthfully say, I don't matter and I don't mind?
Rebecca Goldstein
#31. Plato worries our thinking might become too reflexive and comfortable with itself.
Rebecca Goldstein
#32. Jewish Warsaw, which was roughly a third of Warsaw proper, was a city of rabbis and swindlers, capitalists and poets; but, most of all, it was a city of talkers. There were so many ideas in the air you could get an education simply by breathing deeply. (p. 206)
Rebecca Goldstein
#33. We each carry our own designated end within us, our very own death ripening at its own rate inside of us. There are insignificant people who are harboring unawares the grandeur of large deaths. We carry it in us like a darkening fruit. It opens and spills out. That is death.
Rebecca Goldstein
#34. Less money spent on billboards that just make us feel good about ourselves and more on soup kitchens and organized visits to the sick and dying.
Rebecca Goldstein
#35. For Jascha, artistic creation was the most private activity in the world: the soul's sacred and solitary communion with itself. (p. 244)
Rebecca Goldstein
#36. Since physics is poetry, then poetry is physics, he propounded.
Rebecca Goldstein
#37. I'm a Spinozist. I believe in reason. I think all the progress that we've made making this a better world have been because of reason and not religion. I think religion has been pulled along by reason and that's why we read The Bible now so differently, even believers.
Rebecca Goldstein
#38. Genius in a person was like weed that takes over the entire garden, that won't allow anything else to grow. (p. 251)
Rebecca Goldstein
#39. I don't think I can write the story of my life, but I can write the story of my hair.
Rebecca Goldstein
#40. From the beginning philosophy sought for The order behind the disorder Thales sipped cheap wine And in this did divine: Why it's nothing at all but pure water!
Rebecca Goldstein
#42. And by the way, Sherlock Holmes is Jewish. He changed his name. I'm surprised you nerver guessed it. (p. 248)
Rebecca Goldstein
#43. Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.
Rebecca Goldstein
#44. He hadn't altogether gotten it himself until this moment of seeing straight through to the soul of her.
Rebecca Goldstein
#46. I feel an immediate closeness to anyone who loves New York or hates Los Angeles. Either condition is sufficient, but I've found that satisfaction of the one usually entails satisfaction of the other.
Rebecca Goldstein
#47. It's a tiresome proposition, having to take up the work of the Enlightenment all over again, but it's happened on your watch.
Rebecca Goldstein
#48. The good polis is made by the good person, his moral character intact, and the good polis, in turn, helps turn out good persons, their moral character intact.
Rebecca Goldstein
#49. Because of the failure of religion to offer satisfying answers to an increasing number of people, it's time for philosophy to address forcefully these questions that everybody is wondering about.
Rebecca Goldstein
#50. We may not need God to tell us where the world came from, but we need God to be able to live moral lives and for there to be morality in the first place.
Rebecca Goldstein
#51. (I)n order to refute a conclusion, you have to put forth the best possible argument for it. (p. 158)
Rebecca Goldstein
#52. For the ancient Greeks, who lacked our social media, the only way to achieve mass duplication of the details of one's life in the apprehension of others was to do something wondrously worth the telling. Our wondrous technologies might just save us all the personal bother. Kleos is a tweak away.
Rebecca Goldstein
#53. Conclusions that philosophers first establish by way of torturous reasoning have a way, over time, of leaking into shared knowledge.
Rebecca Goldstein
#54. Those who share my heroes are, in the deepest sense, of my own kind.
Rebecca Goldstein
#55. It was intolerable what lay hidden within another, intolerable tat you could not divide one person into another with no remainder.
Rebecca Goldstein
#57. The mistake of all the religions is to look outside the world for explanations of the world, rather than rethinking the world itself, so that it offers up its own explanations for itself. The world itself must be self-explanatory.
Rebecca Goldstein
#58. I've got access to your mysterious body but not your mysterious soul. Souls seem to me the loneliest possibility of all.
Rebecca Goldstein
#59. I have a Greek-American friend who named her daughter "Nike" and is often asked why she chose to name her offspring after a sneaker.
Rebecca Goldstein
#61. Ven mazel kumt, shtelt im a shtul. When mazel comes, pull up a chair for it. (p. 292)
Rebecca Goldstein
#62. Reality is infinite and we are finite and so there is a necessary mismatch between our knowledge of the world and the world itself.
Rebecca Goldstein
#64. How can those who possess all knowledge, which must include knowledge of life that is worth living, be interested in using knowledge only for the insignificant aim of making money?
Rebecca Goldstein
#65. If you don't exert yourself, or if your exertions don't amount to much of anything, then you might as well not have bothered to have shown up for your existence at all.
Rebecca Goldstein
#66. Given cognitive vulnerabilities, it would be convenient to have an arrangement whereby reality could tell us off; and that is precisely what science is. Scientific methodology is the arrangement that allows reality to answer us back.
Rebecca Goldstein
#67. That's one of the compensations for being mediocre. One doesn't have to worry about becoming mediocre.
Rebecca Goldstein
#68. When the first people started to argue against slavery, for example, this was a new idea. If you crowd-source, you'd never come up with this. And so the - exactly the kind of progress we've made couldn't be made if we depend it on crowd-sourcing.
Rebecca Goldstein
#70. Paraphrasing Plato's Republic: Only people who have allowed themselves to be reformed by reality have it in themselves to reform their polis for the better.
Rebecca Goldstein
#71. What is love? When you love somebody then I mean we all want good things to happen to ourselves and keep the bad things at bay. When you love somebody you want that as much for them if not more than you do for yourself.
Rebecca Goldstein
#72. Philosophy addresses, in a systematic and progress-making way, questions of deep concern to everyone.
Rebecca Goldstein
#73. If we look at our attitudes consistently and work out the logical implications we're on the road to moral progress, moral understanding.
Rebecca Goldstein
#74. Everybody is struggling to refine their views in opposition to the other people. And that's one of the most important things that philosophy actually has to teach us that you have to air your views and bring them to the table with people - with whom you disagree very much.
Rebecca Goldstein
#75. As Plato: What is play and delightful one kind of child is coercion and torture for another, and will not take no matter how much coercion is applied.
Rebecca Goldstein
#76. And what is it, according to Plato, that philosophy is supposed to do? Nothing less than to render violence to our sense of ourselves and our world, our sense of ourselves in the world. (p. 40)
Rebecca Goldstein
#77. In fact, it's the very impersonality of impersonal knowledge that renders such knowledge the most ethically potent of all.
Rebecca Goldstein
#78. (As Plato There is nothing superstitious about forcing bad consequences for the hubris of paternalistic utopianism. Humanity should never be frozen into a vision of the best. A creative society must be willing to tolerate some degree of instability because creativity is inherently unstable.
Rebecca Goldstein
#79. It baffled me how people could resist math's gorgeousness, but people did, and people do. The fine of its purity drives them away, the purity of the fine, unmixed with the heaviness of unnecessitated being.
Rebecca Goldstein
#80. Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.
Rebecca Goldstein
#81. If we don't understand our tools, then there is a danger we will become the tool of our tools. We think of ourselves as Google's customers, but really we're its products.
Rebecca Goldstein
#82. And now having a child has been taken out of the sphere of biological determinism and placed instead in the domain of intentional action. Another option to consider and decide upon. And ... not to choose is to choose.
Rebecca Goldstein
#83. Kleos is sometimes translated as "acoustic renown" the spreading renown you get from people talking about your exploits. It's a bit like having a large Twitter following.
Rebecca Goldstein
#84. Philosophy is this amazing technique we've devised for getting reality to answer us back when we're getting it wrong. Science itself can't make those arguments. You actually have to rely on philosophy, on philosophy of science.
Rebecca Goldstein
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