85+ Rebecca Goldstein Quotes On Education, Religion And Culture

Rebecca Goldstein is an American novelist and philosopher. She is best known for her novels The Mind-Body Problem, The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind, and 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. Her work often focuses on the intersection of philosophy and literature, and her writing has been praised for its insight into the complexities of human relationships. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Rebecca Goldstein on education, life, religion.

Top 10 Rebecca Goldstein Quotes

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.
4. To matter, to mind. ... What we mind is in our power, but whether we matter may not be - and there's the tragedy. ... Can anyone truthfully say, I don't matter and I don't mind?
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. What one tries to force into a child against its own nature will never come to good.
8. Paraphrasing Plato's Republic: "Only people who have allowed themselves to be reformed by reality have it in themselves to reform their polis for the better."
9. 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.
10. Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.

Rebecca Goldstein Short Quotes

• Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldn't be prepared to make for other people.
• Mother' is not an identity one can just try on for size.
• Those who share my heroes are, in the deepest sense, of my own kind.
• In order to refute a conclusion, you have to put forth the best possible argument for it.
• The will to matter is at least as important as the will to believe.
• Thinking is the soul speaking to itself.
• Answers? Forget answers. The spectacle is all in the questions.

Rebecca Goldstein Quotes About Life

The sum and substance of education is the right training that effectually leads the soul of the child at play on to the love of the calling in its adult life. — Rebecca Goldstein

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. — 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

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

I don't think I can write the story of my life, but I can write the story of my hair. — Rebecca Goldstein

We may not need God to tell us where the world came from, but we need God to be able to live moral lives and for there to be morality in the first place. — Rebecca Goldstein

Plato's concern is not just an intellectual issue, but it is knitted with emotional life as well. — Rebecca Goldstein

Rebecca Goldstein Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

In Greek, our word for play is paidia and the word for education is paideia, and it is very natural and right that these words should be entangled at the root, together with our word for children, paides, which gave you your words pedagogy and pediatrician. — Rebecca Goldstein

Everybody is struggling to refine their views in opposition to the other people. And that's one of the most important things that philosophy actually has to teach us that you have to air your views and bring them to the table with people - with whom you disagree very much. — Rebecca Goldstein

Like mathematics and music and cosmology and philosophy, poetry, too, can "infinitize" us, granting us what immortality there is to be had in this mortal life. And all those who vibrate in harmony to language that itself vibrates to the harmonies of the infinite are entitled to inclusion among the "small group of people. — Rebecca Goldstein

Our humanist community should be thinking more about demonstrating the fundamental truth that goodness requires neither God nor the belief in God by organizing together as a community to do good. 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

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. — Rebecca Goldstein

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. — 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

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

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

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

It's something that's very often said that philosophy, as opposed to science, never makes any progress. — Rebecca Goldstein

There is nothing superstitious about forcing bad consequences for the hubris of paternalistic utopianism. Humanity should never be frozen into a vision of the best. A creative society must be willing to tolerate some degree of instability because creativity is inherently unstable. — 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

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. — Rebecca Goldstein

I've got access to your mysterious body but not your mysterious soul. Souls seem to me the loneliest possibility of all. — 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

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. — Rebecca Goldstein

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. — Rebecca Goldstein

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

When the first people started to argue against slavery, for example, this was a new idea. If you crowd-source, you'd never come up with this. And so the - exactly the kind of progress we've made couldn't be made if we depend it on crowd-sourcing. — Rebecca Goldstein

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

Because of the failure of religion to offer satisfying answers to an increasing number of people, it's time for philosophy to address forcefully these questions that everybody is wondering about. — Rebecca Goldstein

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

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

I think one reason is that philosophers are more insecure to speak accessibly because non-philosophers are skeptical that philosophers have any special expertise. After all, all people - not just philosophers - have attitudes and points of view on various philosophical questions, and they rather resent being told that there are professionals who can think about these things better. — Rebecca Goldstein

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. — Rebecca Goldstein

Philosophy addresses, in a systematic and progress-making way, questions of deep concern to everyone. — Rebecca Goldstein

I have a Greek-American friend who named her daughter "Nike" and is often asked why she chose to name her offspring after a sneaker. — Rebecca Goldstein

What is it precisely, that they are doing when they are doing science. Are they refining their instruments for observation or discovering new aspects of reality? — Rebecca Goldstein

If we look at our attitudes consistently and work out the logical implications we're on the road to moral progress, moral understanding. — 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

We need science. We need empirical evidence. We can't just use mathematical reasoning to deduce the nature of the world. — 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

God doesn't help. I think that's a knockdown argument. I think that it really shows that whatever moral knowledge we have and whatever moral progress we make in our knowledge or whatever progress we make in our moral knowledge is not coming really from religion. It's coming from the very hard work really of moral philosophy, of trying to ground our moral reasonings. — Rebecca Goldstein

So Socrates was a kind of gadfly. He was a sort of philosophical urban gorilla hanging around in the middle of Athens, asking these peculiar questions of everybody - important people, young men, slaves - questions that had to do with ultimately what's the life that's worth living. And Plato was one of the young men who hung around him, a very aristocratic young man, came from a very old, important family. — Rebecca Goldstein

When we call a philosopher distinguished, we are not saying that she is worthy and not saying that she is recognized, but we are saying that she occupies the intersection of both - that she is recognized and worthy; even that she is recognized because she's worthy. — 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

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

One of the interesting things about the ancient Greeks is that they really didn't have our conception of individual rights. They didn't have our conception of all lives matters. And it was really was true for them, that certain lives matter a lot more than others. It didn't dawn on them that all lives, although different, can be lives of equal mattering. And that is actually something a huge ethical lesson. — Rebecca Goldstein

This is the pedagogical paradox. The person and the teacher is required precisely because the knowledge itself is nontransferable from teacher to student. — Rebecca Goldstein

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. — Rebecca Goldstein

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

Our society is falling back increasingly on rampant consumerism and self-promoting social media as a way for people to feel that their lives matter - self-centered means of numbing the questions of mattering. Culture has relapsed back into the self-aggrandizing, glorifying answers that the Athenians had presumed, which had Socrates railing against them until he got so annoying that they killed him. — Rebecca Goldstein

In fact, it’s the very impersonality of impersonal knowledge that renders such knowledge the most ethically potent of all. — 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

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

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

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. — Rebecca Goldstein

Does God have a reason for wanting us to be charitable, to take care of those who can't take care of themselves? Either God does or God doesn't, it's just logic. If God has a reason then there is a reason independent of God and whatever God's reason is we should figure it out for ourselves. There is a reason and God doesn't really ground morality at all. God wants us to give charity because it's the right thing to do. — 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

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

It was while I was studying philosophy that I came to understand. . . that it is no sign of moral or spiritual strength to believe that for which one has no evidence, neither a priori evidence as in math, nor a posteriori evidence as in science. . . . It's a violation almost immoral in its transgressiveness to shirk the responsibilities of rationality. — Rebecca Goldstein

I was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household and I wouldn't say so much it's informed my views, but it's informed my interest, so I think as a child I was often very baffled by knowledge claims. — 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

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

Given cognitive vulnerabilities, it would be convenient to have an arrangement whereby reality could tell us off; and that is precisely what science is. Scientific methodology is the arrangement that allows reality to answer us back. — Rebecca Goldstein

Are there experts, ethical experts, that's very offensive to all of us? Because it's part of our humanity to have a stake in these questions to feel that we ourselves know the difference between right and wrong. And then along come these experts, philosophers, claiming, you know, an expertise, a special training, a special skill, a special talent. — 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

Philosophy is this amazing technique we've devised for getting reality to answer us back when we're getting it wrong. Science itself can't make those arguments. You actually have to rely on philosophy, on philosophy of science. — Rebecca Goldstein

Life Lessons by Rebecca Goldstein

1. Rebecca Goldstein's work emphasizes the importance of questioning accepted norms and exploring the complexities of human relationships.
2. Her writing encourages readers to think critically about their own beliefs and experiences, as well as those of others.
3. Through her work, Goldstein encourages readers to challenge the status quo and embrace the beauty of diversity.