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

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
Thinking
Settled
Philosophical
Violence
Doesn
Mind

More quotes by Rebecca Goldstein

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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.
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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.
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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.
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Almost everybody thinks about philosophy, even if they don't realize it's philosophy and even if they have no sense of the difficulty of the problems, the array of possible answers.
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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?
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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.
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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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Philosophers feel a little more cautious about letting down their technical guard lest the general public doesn't recognize their special credentials. It's the fact that philosophy is of general interest that, paradoxically, keeps philosophers from wanting to speak in a way that's accessible to the general public.
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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.
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Colleges seem to want candidates that are so well-rounded they'd have to be two different people use together with mutually exclusive characteristics! They have to be gung ho athletes and sensitive artists, studious nerds and gregarious social networkers, future rulers of the universe and selfless altruists.
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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.
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Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.
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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
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That's one of the compensations for being mediocre. One doesn't have to worry about becoming mediocre.
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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It's very important to remember that the philosophers were social dissidents. They were social critics. The man in the street or woman in the street did not particularly cherish what they said. Socrates was killed.
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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.
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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
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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