As Plato: It is an essential feature of the just state that the wealthy be kept away from political power and that the politically powerful be kept away from wealth.
The contrast between the two, the sweetness and the badness, wrenches the heart of the lover as such sweetness on its own would not, and the lover shudders all the more at dread of the beloved’s reckl...
Since physics is poetry, then poetry is physics, he propounded.
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 h...
Ven mazel kumt, shtelt im a shtul. When mazel comes, pull up a chair for it. (p. 292)
The opposite of a plain truth, Neils Bohr liked to repeat, is a plain falsehood. But the opposite of a deep truth is another deep truth.
It’s a tiresome proposition, having to take up the work of the Enlightenment all over again, but it’s happened on your watch. You ought to have sent up a balloon now and then to get a read on the prev...
It was intolerable what lay hidden within another, intolerable tat you could not divide one person into another with no remainder.
Genius in a person was like weed that takes over the entire garden, that won't allow anything else to grow. (p. 251)
Inside out, with all the Sturm und
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 th...
The necessary incompleteness of even our formal systems of thought demonstrates that there is no nonshifting foundation on which any system rests. All truths — even those that had seemed so certain as...
Jewish Warsaw, which was roughly a third of Warsaw proper, was a city of rabbis and swindlers, capitalists and poets; but, most of all, it was a city of talkers. There were so many ideas in the air yo...
It’s a tiresome proposition, having to take up the work of the Enlightenment all over again, but it’s happened on your watch.
For Jascha, artistic creation was the most private activity in the world: the soul's sacred and solitary communion with itself. (p. 244)
Einstein’s and Gödel’s metaconvictions were addressed to the question of whether their respective fields are descriptions of an objective reality—existing independent of our thinking of it—or, rather,...
And by the way, Sherlock Holmes is Jewish. He changed his name. I'm surprised you nerver guessed it. (p. 248)
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.
Pythagoras, should he want to continue on for a degree in modern-day mathematics, would have to learn to abide far more counterintuitive results than numbers that cannot be written as ratios between w...
Mathematicians prove all sorts of truths about numbers, truths that often assert the existence of certain numbers (for example, given two rational numbers, there exists a rational number between them)...
