Quotes from Rebecca Goldstein

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

Hershel Blau, son of the Chasidic wandering preacher, was not yet so distant from his father's world that he didn't know deep in his soul the yearning to fly. What is a Chasid's dance but one long, sustained attempt to arch away into suspended ascension, beyond laws of bodies, a thing of air and light and fire? (p. 261)

Blau suffered from a mild form of messianism, an ailment as common among Jewish males as nearsightedness. (p. 264)

Philosophical progress is invisible because it is incorporated into our points of view. 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.

Ven mazel kumt, shtelt im a shtul. When mazel comes, pull up a chair for it. (p. 292)

So did he answer you? I finally had to ask her after a considerable pause, accompanied by the tapping of her fingernails. (illustration credit ill.3) Not really, she said. I'm not sure giving answers is in his bag of tricks. He seems to be more about messing with your mind so that you can't stop thinking about his questions. And if he thinks I can afford to keep stepping out of time like this, with my schedule, then, well, he's just way off. Maybe

Since physics is poetry, then poetry is physics, he propounded.

It was intolerable what lay hidden within another, intolerable tat you could not divide one person into another with no remainder.

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?

the activity of posing scientific questions prematurely is the most useful thing of which philosophy can be accused.

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.

It's deplorable that academia should prostitute itself, but there it is. Not even Harvard is above it. In fact, Harvard least of all, with that ludicrous delusion of self-importance that makes every Harvard professor feel he's a public intellectual, qualified to comment on issues far beyond his expertise.

Every morning I had to force myself to leave the apartment, so dark and protected, its walls lined with books. I stared longingly at the few English titles scattered among them. No, I'd tell myself sternly, you will not sit in an apartment in Rome reading William James' Varieties of Religious Experience. Get out there and have some experiences for yourself, religious or otherwise. And I'd push myself out into the relentless noise and glare.

Exiting the ideological cave, where all our questions are answered and everyone we know agrees with us, is the hardest and most significant step we can take. But if we don't take that step, then we will leave this life no closer to the truth than when we entered it. And that is exactly what it is to live a life not worth living, even if it proves to be the most pleasant sort of existence.

Our world is eagerly awaiting the posthumous publication of his works, which are rumored to contain an a priori proof of God's existence—a situation which has prompted me to flirt with the idea of a symbolism-heavy play entitled Waiting for Gödel.)

We achieve a life worth living by understanding how the cosmos achieved an existence worth existing. The impersonally sublime is internalized into personal virtue. Plato: For measure and proportion manifest themselves in all areas as beauty and virtue

Shoket: ... You've got physics and cosmology closing in on the age-old problem of why there's something rather than nothing—that's one you philosophers, not to speak of theologians, have been chewing over a while. With we neuroscientists explaining consciousness, free will, and morality, what's left for the philosophers to ponder? Plato: Perhaps self-deception?

In fact, the answers that religion, as we have come to know it, provides to the question of human worth have played so dominant a role in the preceding centuries that believers often cannot conceive how non-believers can muster sufficient commitment to their own lives to get out of bed each morning, let alone the ethical wherewithal to regard others as deserving of moral regard. Once one "comes out" as an atheist, these are the inquisitions to which one is often subjected.

Conclusions that philosophers first establish by way of torturous reasoning have a way, over time, of leaking into shared knowledge.

If we don't understand our tools, then there is a danger that we will become the tool of our tools

And by the way, Sherlock Holmes is Jewish. He changed his name. I'm surprised you nerver guessed it. (p. 248)

Genius in a person was like weed that takes over the entire garden, that won't allow anything else to grow. (p. 251)

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 numbers21 that he sent the poor fellow out on a raft to drown, initiating a venerable tradition of professors mistreating their graduate students.

the success of relativistic quantum field theory offers no reason to believe that there is any such thing as a relativistic quantum field.