Rebecca Goldstein Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  Religious, Atheist, Math

  52 Copy quote

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

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Philosophical, Thinking, Mind

  Rebecca Goldstein (2014). “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away”, p.44, Pantheon

  5 Copy quote

• Answers? Forget answers. The spectacle is all in the questions.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Answers, Forget

  Rebecca Goldstein (1993). “The Mind-Body Problem”, Penguin Group USA

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• Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldn't be prepared to make for other people.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  People, Excuse, Be Prepared

  Source: www.goodreads.com

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• 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

  Intuition, Argument, Forget

  Rebecca Goldstein (2014). “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away”, p.17, Pantheon

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• The will to matter is at least as important as the will to believe.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Believe, Important, Matter

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• Does God have a reason for wanting us to be charitable, to take care of those who can't take care of themselves? Either God does or God doesn't, it's just logic. If God has a reason then there is a reason independent of God and whatever God's reason is we should figure it out for ourselves. There is a reason and God doesn't really ground morality at all. God wants us to give charity because it's the right thing to do.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Independent, Giving, Doe

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. January 20, 2010.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Husband, Party, Salad

  Rebecca Goldstein (1993). “The Mind-Body Problem”, Penguin Group USA

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• 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

  Believe, Thinking, Progress

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. January 20, 2010.

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• 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

  Spiritual, Philosophy, Believe

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• Thinking is the soul speaking to itself.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Thinking, Soul

  Rebecca Goldstein (2014). “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away”, p.198, Pantheon

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• What 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

  Religious, Philosophy, Cities

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• 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

  Fall, Mean, Self

  "Interview With Rebecca Goldstein on Plato at the Googleplex, Philosophy for the Public, and Everything". Interview with Ophelia Benson, www.butterfliesandwheels.org. March 20, 2014.

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• 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

  Thinking, Google, Tools

  Source: www.goodreads.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Struggle, Accomplishment, Excellence

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Philosophy, Hard Work, Thinking

  Source: bigthink.com

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• 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

  Philosophy, Struggle, Air

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

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Soul, Body, Mysterious

  Rebecca Goldstein (2000). “Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal, and Quantum Physics”, p.40, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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

  Liars, Character, Ugly Things

  Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (2014). “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away”, p.149, Atlantic Books Ltd

  4 Copy quote

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

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Plato, Way, Philosopher

  Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (2014). “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away”, p.17, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• I was trained as a philosopher never to put philosophers and their ideas into historical contexts, since historical context has nothing to do with the validity of the philosopher's positions. I agree that assessing validity and contextualizing historically are two entirely distinct matters and not to be confused with one another. And yet that firm distinction doesn't lead me to endorse the usual way in which history of philosophy is presented.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Confused, Philosophy, Ideas

  Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (2014). “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away”, p.165, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• 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

  Want, Matter, Deeper

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

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Worry, Becoming, Being Me

  Rebecca Goldstein (1993). “The Mind-Body Problem”, Penguin Group USA

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• The sum and substance of education is the right training that effectually leads the soul of the child at play on to the love of the calling in its adult life.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  Children, Play, Soul

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• 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

  Daughter, Nike, Sneakers

  Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (2014). “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away”, p.143, Atlantic Books Ltd

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