Rebecca Goldstein Quotes

39 Sourced Quotes

What one tries to force into a child against its own nature will never come to good.

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
Hedda was queasily phobic of children and, by extension, of short people in general. They were too condensed, like undiluted cans of soup — too intensely human and, therefore, too intensely not to be trusted. The mistakes in the basic ingredients — the stupidity, the cruelty — were overpoweringly present.

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

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 numbers that he sent the poor fellow out on a raft to drown, initiating a venerable tradition of professors mistreating their graduate students.

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

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
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
Everyone loves a hero. What we differ on is the question of who the heroes are, because we differ over what matters. And who matters is a function of what matters. [If] what matters is intelligence, the people who matter are the intelligent, and the people who matter the most, the heroes, are the geniuses.

Rebecca Goldstein
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
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
The contrast between the two, the sweetness and the badness, wrenches the heart of the lover as such sweetness on its own would not, and the lover shudders all the more at dread of the beloved's recklessness, for the sake of the sweetness that is there, and the shudder only makes more violent the shuddering that announces love.

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

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
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
A child's natural form of behavior is play, and in our aim to educate, play should be honored and preserved for as long past childhood as can be.

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
In order to refute a conclusion, you have to put forth the best possible argument for it.

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

Rebecca Goldstein
The philosophers talk across the centuries exclusively to one another, hermetically sealed from any influences derived from non-philosophical discourse.

Rebecca Goldstein
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
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
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