Rebecca Goldstein Quotes

39 Sourced Quotes

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
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
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.

Rebecca Goldstein
Plato conceived of philosophy as necessarily gregarious rather than solitary. The exposure of presumptions is best done in company, the more argumentative the better.

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

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
One doesn't diminish a philosopher's achievement, and doesn't undermine its soundness, by showing how the particular set of questions on which he focused, the orientation he brought to bear on his focus, has some causal connection to the circumstances of his life.

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

Rebecca Goldstein