Rebecca Goldstein Quotes & Sayings

I think one reason is that philosophers are more insecure to speak accessibly because non-philosophers are skeptical that philosophers have any special expertise. After all, all people - not just philosophers - have attitudes and points of view on various philosophical questions, and they rather resent being told that there are professionals who can think about these things better. — Rebecca Goldstein

And then there is Pythagoras. The legend is that the founder of theoretical mathematics was so outraged when one of his students, the haplessly gifted Hippasus, discovered irrational numbers21 that he sent the poor fellow out on a raft to drown, initiating a venerable tradition of professors mistreating their graduate students. — Rebecca Goldstein

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

And by the way, Sherlock Holmes is Jewish. He changed his name. I'm surprised you nerver guessed it. (p. 248) — Rebecca Goldstein

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

(I)n order to refute a conclusion, you have to put forth the best possible argument for it. (p. 158) — Rebecca Goldstein

I am beautiful for a brainy woman, brainy for a beautiful woman, but objectively speaking, neither beautiful nor brainy. — Rebecca Goldstein

In a field like philosophy, where understanding involves not so much the reception of knowledge but rather a transformation of the receiver itself, so that the receiver, which is to say the student, can generate the knowledge for him- or herself, then the physical presence of the teacher is essential. — Rebecca Goldstein

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

Of course, I'm not one to judge people by their appearances, Rhonda, but from how this guy looked I would have said he had graduated high school with three friends tops, all of them in the computer club with him, and that he had some super-obscure hobby he was obsessed with, like collecting ancient musical instruments or making origami rocket ships that could break the sound barrier, and that, if he noticed women at all, he tried to impress them with how many decimal places of pi he had memorized. — Rebecca Goldstein

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

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

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

Math ... music .. starry nights ... These are secular ways of achieving transcendence, of feeling lifted into a grand perspective. It's a sense of being awed by existence that almost obliterates the self. Religious people think of it as an essentially religious experience but it's not. It's an essentially human experience. — Rebecca Goldstein

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

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

When you didn't force yourself to think in formal reconstructions, when you didn't catch these moments of ravishments under the lens of premises and conclusions, when you didn't impale them and label them, like so many splayed butterflies, bleeding the transcendental glow right out of them, then ... what? — Rebecca Goldstein

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

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

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

We must believe that he will come but never believe that he is come. There is no Messiah but an uncome Messiah. — Rebecca Goldstein

Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute. — Rebecca Goldstein

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

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

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

Answers? Forget answers. The spectacle is all in the questions. — Rebecca Goldstein

I like that there are so many different ways of looking at the world and I like all of the particular narratives. In any case we will never all see the same way on religious issues. It's the way liberals and conservatives will never see the same way on individuals. When we're dealing with questions that can't be definitively answered by science that's where you're sort of your orientation swells in to fill up the gaps and so we're never always going to agree. — Rebecca Goldstein

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

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

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

So Socrates was a kind of gadfly. He was a sort of philosophical urban gorilla hanging around in the middle of Athens, asking these peculiar questions of everybody - important people, young men, slaves - questions that had to do with ultimately what's the life that's worth living. And Plato was one of the young men who hung around him, a very aristocratic young man, came from a very old, important family. — Rebecca Goldstein

Quite often we are led to aporia, an impasse, unable to proceed a step further. Socrates is almost always there, but even he is only a supporting character. The starring role is given to the philosophical question. It is the philosophical question that is supposed to take center stage, cracking us open to an entirely new variety of experience. — Rebecca Goldstein

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

Freedom for me is a pain in the Buridan's ass. — Rebecca Goldstein

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

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

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

Philosophical thinking that doesn't do violence to one's settled mind is no philosophical thinking at all. — Rebecca Goldstein

So did he answer you? I finally had to ask her after a considerable pause, accompanied by the tapping of her fingernails. (illustration credit ill.3) Not really, she said. I'm not sure giving answers is in his bag of tricks. He seems to be more about messing with your mind so that you can't stop thinking about his questions. And if he thinks I can afford to keep stepping out of time like this, with my schedule, then, well, he's just way off. Maybe — Rebecca Goldstein

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

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

The necessary incompleteness of even our formal systems of thought demonstrates that there is no nonshifting foundation on which any system rests. All truths - even those that had seemed so certain as to be immune to the very possibility of revision - are essentially manufactured. Indeed the very notion of the objectively true is a socially constructed myth. Our knowing minds are not embedded in truth. Rather the entire notion of truth is embedded in our minds, which are themselves the unwitting lackeys of organizational forms of influence. — Rebecca Goldstein

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

I don't only act out of my character; my character reacts to my actions. Each time I why, even if I'm not caught, I become a little bit more of this ugly thing: a liar. Character is always in the making, with each morally valenced action, whether right or wrong, affecting our characters, the people who we are. — Rebecca Goldstein

Mother' is not an identity one can just try on for size ... — Rebecca Goldstein

Like mathematics and music and cosmology and philosophy, poetry, too, can "infinitize" us, granting us what immortality there is to be had in this mortal life. And all those who vibrate in harmony to language that itself vibrates to the harmonies of the infinite are entitled to inclusion among the "small group of people. — Rebecca Goldstein

The religious feeling engendered by experiencing the logical comprehensibility of profound interrelations is of a somewhat different sort from the feeling that one usually calls religious. It is more a feeling of awe at the scheme that is manifest in the material universe. It does not lead us to take the step of fashioning a god-like being in our own image - a personage who makes demands of us and who takes an interest in us as individuals. There is in this neither a will nor a goal, nor a must, but only sheer being. — Rebecca Goldstein

Everybody have equal rights to a life of full flourishing. Philosophy slowly, slowly has given us arguments saying, look, you already committed to your own life flourishing, and you're being inconsistent if you don't expand it. So philosophy often works in trying to show us that there's an inner incoherence in our points of view. We're all committed to one thing when it comes to us and our own kind, but we're not willing to expand it and we're guilty of inconsistency. — Rebecca Goldstein

Philosophers feel a little more cautious about letting down their technical guard lest the general public doesn't recognize their special credentials. It's the fact that philosophy is of general interest that, paradoxically, keeps philosophers from wanting to speak in a way that's accessible to the general public. — Rebecca Goldstein

God doesn't help. I think that's a knockdown argument. I think that it really shows that whatever moral knowledge we have and whatever moral progress we make in our knowledge or whatever progress we make in our moral knowledge is not coming really from religion. It's coming from the very hard work really of moral philosophy, of trying to ground our moral reasonings. — Rebecca Goldstein

Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die. — Rebecca Goldstein

That's one of the compensations for being mediocre. One doesn't have to worry about becoming mediocre. — Rebecca Goldstein

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

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

Philosophy addresses, in a systematic and progress-making way, questions of deep concern to everyone. — Rebecca Goldstein

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

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

It was intolerable what lay hidden within another, intolerable tat you could not divide one person into another with no remainder. — Rebecca Goldstein

How irrelevant the belief in God can be to religious experience - so irrelevant that the emotional structure of religious experiences can be transplanted to completely godless contexts with little of the impact lost - and when he had also, almost as an afterthought, included as an appendix thirty-six arguments for the existence of God, with rebuttals, his claim being that the most thorough demolition of these arguments would make little difference to the felt qualities of religious experience, — Rebecca Goldstein

And if the prodigious genius of Azarya Sheiner has never found the solution, then perhaps that is proof that no solution exists, that the most gifted among us is feeble in mind against the brutality of incomprehensibility that assutalts us from all sides. And so we try, as best we cn, to do justice to the tremendousness of our improbable existence. And so we live, as best we can, for ourselves, or who will live for us? And we live, as best we can, for others, otherwise what are we? — Rebecca Goldstein

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

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

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

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

Those who share my heroes are, in the deepest sense, of my own kind. — Rebecca Goldstein

We need science. We need empirical evidence. We can't just use mathematical reasoning to deduce the nature of the world. — Rebecca Goldstein

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

Rational self-interest is always what morality boils down to. — Rebecca Goldstein

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

There's no reason. Mazel, Maurice. Only mazel. (p. 343) — Rebecca Goldstein

Richard Nixon had made a fatal error in ignoring the politico-meteorological dimension when he announced the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia on April 30, 1970. The invasion of Laos, on the other hand, happened in February 1971, and the campuses were quiet. Who wants to stage a walkout in February? — Rebecca Goldstein

Plato's concern is not just an intellectual issue, but it is knitted with emotional life as well. — Rebecca Goldstein

Participation in the collective life of the polis both restrains the extraordinary individual and enlarges the ordinary individual, allowing him to participate in the extraordinary. An individual can achieve participatory excellence via the accomplishments of the polis and need not always be caught up in the agnostic struggle to outdo his peers. — Rebecca Goldstein

Conclusions that philosophers first establish by way of torturous reasoning have a way, over time, of leaking into shared knowledge. — Rebecca Goldstein

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

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

Plato worries our thinking might become too reflexive and comfortable with itself. — Rebecca Goldstein

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

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

Our society is falling back increasingly on rampant consumerism and self-promoting social media as a way for people to feel that their lives matter - self-centered means of numbing the questions of mattering. Culture has relapsed back into the self-aggrandizing, glorifying answers that the Athenians had presumed, which had Socrates railing against them until he got so annoying that they killed him. — Rebecca Goldstein

In fact, it's the very impersonality of impersonal knowledge that renders such knowledge the most ethically potent of all. — Rebecca Goldstein

(W)hat is remarkable about the Greeks
even pre-philosophically
is that despite the salience of religious rituals in their lives, when it came to the question of what it is that makes an individual human life worth living they didn't look to the immortals but rather approached the question in mortal terms. Their approaching the question of human mattering in human terms is the singularity that creates the conditions for philosophy in ancient Greece, most especially as these conditions were realized in the city-state of Athens. — Rebecca Goldstein

S death one of those adventures from which I can't emerge as myself? The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. I wonder every day whether she still exists ... 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. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether? But if my sister does exist, then what is she, and what makes that thing that she now is identical with the beautiful girl laughing at her little sister on that forgotten day? Can she remember that summer's day while I cannot? — Rebecca Goldstein

In fact, the answers that religion, as we have come to know it, provides to the question of human worth have played so dominant a role in the preceding centuries that believers often cannot conceive how non-believers can muster sufficient commitment to their own lives to get out of bed each morning, let alone the ethical wherewithal to regard others as deserving of moral regard. Once one "comes out" as an atheist, these are the inquisitions to which one is often subjected. — Rebecca Goldstein

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

Hershel Blau, son of the Chasidic wandering preacher, was not yet so distant from his father's world that he didn't know deep in his soul the yearning to fly. What is a Chasid's dance but one long, sustained attempt to arch away into suspended ascension, beyond laws of bodies, a thing of air and light and fire? (p. 261) — Rebecca Goldstein

I've got access to your mysterious body but not your mysterious soul. Souls seem to me the loneliest possibility of all. — Rebecca Goldstein

It was while I was studying philosophy that I came to understand ... that it is no sign of moral or spiritual strength to believe that for which one has no evidence, neither a priori evidence as in math, nor a posteriori evidence as in science ... It's a violation almost immoral in its transgressiveness to shirk the responsibilities of rationality. — Rebecca Goldstein

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

Children, who have so much to learn in so short a time, had involved the tendency to trust adults to instruct them in the collective knowledge of our species, and this trust confers survival value. But it also makes children vulnerable to being tricked and adults who exploit this vulnerability should be deeply ashamed. — Rebecca Goldstein

I would say to anybody who thinks that all the problems in philosophy can be translated into empirically verifiable answers - whether it be a Lawrence Krauss thinking that physics is rendering philosophy obsolete or a Sam Harris thinking that neuroscience is rendering moral philosophy obsolete - that it takes an awful lot of philosophy - philosophy of science in the first case, moral philosophy in the second - even to demonstrate the relevance of these empirical sciences. — Rebecca Goldstein

(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

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

I don't think I can write the story of my life, but I can write the story of my hair. — Rebecca Goldstein

Colleges seem to want candidates that are so well-rounded they'd have to be two different people use together with mutually exclusive characteristics! They have to be gung ho athletes and sensitive artists, studious nerds and gregarious social networkers, future rulers of the universe and selfless altruists. — Rebecca Goldstein

inside out, with all the Sturm und — Rebecca Goldstein

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

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

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

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