Quotes by Rebecca Goldstein

About Rebecca Goldstein:

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is an American novelist and philosopher. She has written six novels, a number of short stories and essays, and studies of mathematician Kurt Gödel and philosophers Baruch Spinoza and Plato.
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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 le...

Rebecca Goldstein

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

Rebecca Goldstein

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

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

Rebecca Goldstein

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 ...

Rebecca Goldstein

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 t...

Rebecca Goldstein

Richard Nixon had made a fatal error in ignoring the politico-meteorological dimension when he announced the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia on April 30, 1970. The invasion of Laos, on the other hand, happened in February 1971, and the cam...

Rebecca Goldstein

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

Rebecca Goldstein

As Plato: 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

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.

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 rig...

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

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 networ...

Rebecca Goldstein

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

Rebecca Goldstein

(As Plato:) 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...

Rebecca Goldstein

Everybody makes excuses for themselves they wouldn't be prepared to make for other people.

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

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.

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 al...

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 beca...

Rebecca Goldstein

Author Bio

  • NameRebecca Goldstein
  • DescriptionAmerican novelist, short story writer, biographer, philosopher
  • BornFebruary 23, 1950
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionAuthor; Philosopher
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; MacArthur Fellows Program; Richard Dawkins Award; Humanist Of The Year