Quote

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

Rebecca Goldstein

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Rebecca Goldstein
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: February 23
Author
Biographer
Classical Scholar
Novelist
Philosopher
Writer
White Plains
New York
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
Way
Philosophize
Time
Dramatically
Detachment
Plato
Prepare
Puts
Philosopher
Dies

More quotes by Rebecca Goldstein

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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.
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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.
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Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldn't be prepared to make for other people.
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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.
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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
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It's something that's very often said that philosophy, as opposed to science, never makes any progress.
Rebecca Goldstein
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Answers? Forget answers. The spectacle is all in the questions.
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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
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Thinking is the soul speaking to itself.
Rebecca Goldstein
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Philosophy addresses, in a systematic and progress-making way, questions of deep concern to everyone.
Rebecca Goldstein
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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.
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Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.
Rebecca Goldstein
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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