Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
I've got access to your mysterious body but not your mysterious soul. Souls seem to me the loneliest possibility of all.
Rebecca Goldstein
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Rebecca Goldstein
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: February 23
Author
Biographer
Classical Scholar
Novelist
Philosopher
Writer
White Plains
New York
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
Possibility
Seem
Seems
Body
Loneliest
Soul
Mysterious
Souls
Access
More quotes by Rebecca Goldstein
Answers? Forget answers. The spectacle is all in the questions.
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 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
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
In fact, it’s the very impersonality of impersonal knowledge that renders such knowledge the most ethically potent of all.
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
We need science. We need empirical evidence. We can't just use mathematical reasoning to deduce the nature of the world.
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
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
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
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
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
Those who share my heroes are, in the deepest sense, of my own kind.
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
Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.
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
Philosophical thinking that doesn't do violence to one's settled mind is no philosophical thinking at all.
Rebecca Goldstein
If there is such a thing as philosophical progress, then why - unlike scientific progress - is it so invisible? Philosophical progress is invisible because it is incorporated into our points of view. What was torturously secured by complex argument comes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance.
Rebecca Goldstein
Thinking is the soul speaking to itself.
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