Top 50 Rebecca Goldstein Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

2. “I don’t think I can write the story of my life, but I can write the story of my hair.”

— Rebecca Goldstein

3. “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

4. “We need science. We need empirical evidence. We can’t just use mathematical reasoning to deduce the nature of the world.”

— Rebecca Goldstein

5. “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

6. “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

7. “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

8. “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

9. “As Plato: 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

10. “I’ve got access to your mysterious body but not your mysterious soul. Souls seem to me the loneliest possibility of all.”

— Rebecca Goldstein

11. “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

12. “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

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

— Rebecca Goldstein

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “All truths – even those that had seemed so certain as to be immune to the very possibility of revision – are essentially manufactured. Indeed the very notion of the objectively true is a socially constructed myth. Our knowing minds are not embedded in truth. Rather the entire notion of truth is embedded in our minds, which are themselves the unwitting lackeys of organizational forms of influence.”

— Rebecca Goldstein

18. “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

19. “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

20. “It’s something that’s very often said that philosophy, as opposed to science, never makes any progress.”

— Rebecca Goldstein

21. “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

22. “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

23. “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

24. “A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world.”

— Rebecca Goldstein

25. “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

26. “When you didn’t force yourself to think in formal reconstructions, when you didn’t catch these moments of ravishments under the lens of premises and conclusions, when you didn’t impale them and label them, like so many splayed butterflies, bleeding the transcendental glow right out of them, then... what?”

— Rebecca Goldstein

27. “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

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

— Rebecca Goldstein

29. “The opposite of a plain truth, Neils Bohr liked to repeat, is a plain falsehood. But the opposite of a deep truth is another deep truth.”

— Rebecca Goldstein

30. “Answers? Forget answers. The spectacle is all in the questions.”

— Rebecca Goldstein

31. “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

32. “Plato’s concern is not just an intellectual issue, but it is knitted with emotional life as well.”

— Rebecca Goldstein

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

36. “Philosophy addresses, in a systematic and progress-making way, questions of deep concern to everyone.”

— Rebecca Goldstein

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

— Rebecca Goldstein

38. “Those who share my heroes are, in the deepest sense, of my own kind.”

— Rebecca Goldstein

39. “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

40. “No validation of our rationality – of our very sanity – can be accomplished using our rationality itself. How can a person operating within a system of beliefs, including beliefs about beliefs, get outside that system to determine whether it is rational? If your entire system becomes infected with madness, including the very rules by which you reason, then how can you ever reason your way out of your madness?”

— Rebecca Goldstein

41. “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

42. “Thinking is the soul speaking to itself.”

— Rebecca Goldstein

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

— Rebecca Goldstein

44. “Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldn’t be prepared to make for other people.”

— Rebecca Goldstein

45. “The only object we truly possess is our own mind. The only pleasure over which we have complete dominion is the progress of our own understanding.”

— Rebecca Goldstein

46. “That’s one of the compensations for being mediocre. One doesn’t have to worry about becoming mediocre.”

— Rebecca Goldstein

47. “Our failures in charity are chained to a narrowed vision of the world that makes too much of the differences between us, and this is our enslavement.”

— Rebecca Goldstein

48. “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

49. “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

50. “It baffled me how people could resist math’s 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.”

— Rebecca Goldstein