Quotes by Rebecca Goldstein

Paraphrasing Platos Republic: Only people who have allowed themselves to be reformed by reality have it in themselves to reform their polis for the better.

one evangelical scientist who had felt his doubts falling away from him when he was hiking in the mountains and came upon a frozen waterfall—in fact a trinity of a frozen waterfall, with three parts to it. “At that moment, I felt my resistance leave me. And it was a great sense of relief.

He hadn’t altogether gotten it himself until this moment of seeing straight through to the soul of her.

It’s a tiresome proposition, having to take up the work of the Enlightenment all over again, but it’s happened on your watch.

leave me. And it was a great sense of relief. The

how irrelevant the belief in God can be to religious experience—so irrelevant that the emotional structure of religious experiences can be transplanted to completely godless contexts with little of the impact lost—and when he had also, almost as an afterthought, included as an appendix thirty-six arguments for the existence of God, with rebuttals, his claim being that the most thorough demolition of these arguments would make little difference to the felt qualities of religious experience,

When you didnt force yourself to think in formal reconstructions, when you didnt catch these moments of ravishments under the lens of premises and conclusions, when you didnt impale them and label them, like so many splayed butterflies, bleeding the transcendental glow right out of them, then... what?

Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldnt be prepared to make for other people.

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?

The will to matter is at least as important as the will to believe.

For the ancient Greeks, who lacked our social media, the only way to achieve mass duplication of the details of ones 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.

It baffled me how people could resist maths gorgeousness, but people did, and people do. The fine of its purity drives them away, the purity of the fine, unmixed with the heaviness of unnecessitated being.

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 shes worthy. In the case of arate, the direction of the because can seem a little vaguer, so that it can sometimes seem almost as if someone is regarded as worthy because they are recognized.

Kleos is sometimes translated as acoustic renown the spreading renown you get from people talking about your exploits. Its a bit like having a large Twitter following.

Colleges seem to want candidates that are so well-rounded theyd 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.

Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.