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Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity QUOTES

Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity QUOTES

1 " 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 , Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

2 " 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 , Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

3 " s death one of those adventures from which I can’t emerge as myself? The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. I wonder every day whether she still exists . . . 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. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether? But if my sister does exist, then what is she, and what makes that thing that she now is identical with the beautiful girl laughing at her little sister on that forgotten day? Can she remember that summer’s day while I cannot? "

― Rebecca Goldstein , Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

4 " Is death one of those adventures from which I can’t emerge as myself? The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. I wonder every day whether she still exists . . . 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. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether? But if my sister does exist, then what is she, and what makes that thing that she now is identical with the beautiful girl laughing at her little sister on that forgotten day? Can she remember that summer’s day while I cannot? "

― Rebecca Goldstein , Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

5 " The religious feeling engendered by experiencing the logical comprehensibility of profound interrelations is of a somewhat different sort from the feeling that one usually calls religious. It is more a feeling of awe at the scheme that is manifest in the material universe. It does not lead us to take the step of fashioning a god-like being in our own image - a personage who makes demands of us and who takes an interest in us as individuals. There is in this neither a will nor a goal, nor a must, but only sheer being. "

― Rebecca Goldstein , Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

6 " The mistake of all the religions is to look outside the world for explanations of the world, rather than rethinking the world itself, so that it offers up its own explanations for itself. The world itself must be self-explanatory. "

― Rebecca Goldstein , Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

7 " His religion asks us to do something that is far more difficult for us than the most severe practices of asceticism. It asks us to be reasonable. It asks us to look at ourselves with unblinking objectivity. It asks us to subdue our natural inclinations toward self-aggrandizement, our attempts to shore up our dreadful fragility by fictions of a God who favors us because we were born—thank God!—into the right group, or have gone through the nuisance of converting to it. And it asks us, as well, to face squarely the terror of our own mortality. "

― Rebecca Goldstein , Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity