A Quote by Rebecca Goldstein

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

Rebecca Goldstein

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Detachment Die Dramatically His His Way Philosopher Plato Prepare Puts Time Way

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Rebecca Goldstein
American - Novelist
Born: February 23, 1950

Learning to live ought to mean learning to die - to acknowledge, to accept, an absolute mortality - without positive outcome,or resurrection, or redemption, for oneself or for anyone else. That has been the old philosophical injunction since Plato: to be a philosopher is to learn how to die.

Jacques Derrida

For a courageous man cannot die dishonorably, a man who has attained the consulship cannot die before his time, a philosopher cannot die wretchedly.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Plato assumes somehow that government is a way in which you put unselfish and ungreedy men in charge of selfish and greedy men. But government is an institution whereby the people who have the greatest drive to get power over their fellow men, get in a position of controlling them. Look at the record of government. Where are these philosopher kings that Plato supposedly was trying to develop?

Milton Friedman

Whether we will philosophize or we won't philosophize, we must philosophize.

Aristotle

Plato, by the way, wanted to banish all poets from his proposed Utopia because they were liars. The truth was that Plato knew philosophers couldn't compete successfully with poets.

Kurt Vonnegut

To philosophize is nothing else than to prepare oneself for death.

Michel de Montaigne

Of this I am certain, that no one has ever died who was not destined to die some time. Now the end of life puts the longest life on a par with the shortest... And of what consequence is it what kind of death puts an end to life, since he who has died once is not forced to go through the same ordeal a second time? They, then, who are destined to die, need not be careful to inquire what death they are to die, but into what place death will usher them.

Saint Augustine

Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock. A man toting a sack of blood manure across his lawn is kin to Atlas letting the world spin easy on his shoulder.

Ray Bradbury

To philosophize is to learn to die.

Michel de Montaigne

To philosophize with open eyes is to philosophize in the dark. Only the blind can look straight at the sun.

Louis Althusser

Plato says a multitude can never philosophize and hence can never recognize the seriousness of philosophy or who really philosophizes. Attempting to influence the multitude results in forced prostitution.

Allan Bloom

Through Plato, Aristotle came to believe in God; but Plato never attempted to prove His reality. Aristotle had to do so. Plato contemplated Him; Aristotle produced arguments to demonstrate Him. Plato never defined Him; but Aristotle thought God through logically, and concluded with entire satisfaction to himself that He was the Unmoved Mover.

Edith Hamilton

Indifference looks like detachment, but it is not; indifference is simply no interest. Detachment is not absence of interest - detachment is absolute interest, tremendous interest, but still with the capacity of non-clinging. Enjoy the moment while it is there and when the moment starts disappearing, as everything is bound to disappear, let it go. That is detachment.

Rajneesh

The way, applicable in our non-revolutionary societies, to prepare for the time when everyone will read, is to pose problems in the most radical and intransigent manner. This is what Alain Badiou has just done in Almagestes, where he puts language on trial with an intention of cleansing, of catharsis.

Jean-Paul Sartre

And Numenius, the Pythagorean philosopher, expressly writes: 'For what is Plato, but Moses speaking in Attic Greek.'

Clement of Alexandria

What need had the businessman to scribble or philosophize when he dominated the imagination of his time and the frantic materialism that was his principle of existence had become the haunting central figure in contemporary life?

Alfred Kazin

A Quote by Rebecca Goldstein

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