Quotes from Susan Neiman

Philosophy's greatest task is to enlarge our sense of possibility.

As long as your ideas of what's possible are limited by what's actual, no other idea has a chance.

Growing up means realizing that no time of one's life is the best one, and resolving to savor every second of joy within reach. You know each will pass, and you no longer experience that as betrayal.

Whatever else you may need to get clarity, you must start with open eyes.

One great function of the arts is to keep ideals alive in a culture that does not yet realize them.

Freedom cannot simply mean doing whatever strikes you at the moment: that way you're a slave to any whim or passing fancy. Real freedom involves control over your life as a whole, learning to make plans and promises and decisions, to take responsibility for your actions' consequences.

Philosophy's greatest task is to enlarge our sense of possibility.

If life is a gift, then the more you partake in it, the more you show thanks.

God's message is that we are largely on our own. We are the ones who give moral guidelines body and life. You can take, if you will, your solace in heaven, but you must work out your ethics on earth.

most of us no longer have the luxury of asking whether a job is genuinely productive, but only whether it pays well and has tolerable conditions.

Human attempts to construct moral order are always precarious: If righteousness too often leads to self-righteousness, the demand for justice can lead to one guillotine or another.

Negotiating small differences is part of being a grownup; no one can tell you in advance where to put your foot down.

Ordinary goodness is fraught with veins of vanity and self-interest and above all with pleasure--because goodness makes you feel more alive.

great thinkers simply got stuck out of sheer curiosity investigating very general questions about the way things are.

In the most general terms, the Enlightenment goes back to Plato's belief that truth and beauty and goodness are connected; that truth and beauty, disseminated widely, will sooner or later lead to goodness. (While we're making at effort at truth and goodness, beauty reminds us what we're hold out for.)

You may substitute knowledge for superstition without satisfying the needs that drive people into superstition's arms.

Vitality is not the denial of mortality, but the grown-up way of facing it.

the problem of evil is the guiding force of modern thought.

Home is the normal--whatever place you happen to start from and return to without having to answer questions. It's a metaphor that may seem to fit reduced expectations. We no longer seek towers that would reach to the heavens; we've abandoned attempts to prove that we live in a chain of being whose every link bears witness to the glory of God. We merely seek assurance that we find ourselves in a place where we know our way about.

Tribalism will always make your world smaller; universalism is the only way to expand it.

When education is overwhelmed by hypermedia, travel facile or ruinous, and work a blurred mixture of more dependence and less meaning, it's harder than ever to use those experiences to grow. But growing up, I have argued, has been dogged by dilemma ever since it was a real option. As Enlightenment philosophers knew, it's a process that is as socially determined as it is profoundly individual.

Dogma--ideas uninformed by experience--is a form of ingratitude.

It's an embarrassing fact that we are more afraid of embarrassment than a host of other discomforts, but it isn't less true for all that. How often have you refrained from voicing hope or indignation for fear of being dismissed as childish? Oddly enough, that fear is adolescent, born of a time when few things feel worse than being regarded as a less grown-up than your peers.

Kitsch is much more than a question of style; it's a preference for consolation over truth. Disney's version of reality is not just cleaned up, it's pernicious. Unlike the best forms of art and philosophy, it undercuts the possibility of transformation because it portrays a world that's just fine as it is--or as it will be by the time the credits come up.