Jostein Gaarder famous quotes

A state that does not educate and train women is like a man who only trains his right arm.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Women #Equality #Arms

A hydrogen atom in a cell at the end of my nose was once part of an elephant's trunk. A carbon atom in my cardiac muscle was once in the tail of a dinosaur.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Elephants #Cells #Noses

How terribly sad it was that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as extraordinary as living.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#People #Way #Used

You can never know if a person forgives you when you wrong them. Therefore it is existentially important to you. It is a question you are intensely concerned with. Neither can you know whether a person loves you. It’s something you just have to believe or hope. But these things are more important to you than the fact that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees. You don't think about the law of cause and effect or about modes of perception when you are in the middle of your first kiss.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Love You #Believe #Kissing

As long as we are children, we have the ability to experience things around us--but then we grow used to the world. To grow up is to get drunk on sensory experience.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Children #Growing Up #Long

Superstitious." What a strange word. If you believed in Christianity or Islam, it was called "faith". But if you believed in astrology or Friday the thirteenth it was superstition! Who had the right to call other people's belief superstition?
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Friday #Astrology #People

But understanding will always require some effort. You probably wouldn't admire a friend who was good at everything if it cost her no effort.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Effort #Understanding #Cost

We are thrown together with a sprinkling of stardust.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Together #Stardust #Thrown

Since the Renaissance, people have had to get used to living their life on a random planet in the vast galaxy.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#People #Renaissance #Used

The most subversive people are those who ask questions.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#People

Wasn’t it extraordinary to be in the world right now, wandering around in a wonderful adventure!
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Adventure #World #Wonderful

I sat thinking how terribly sad it was that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as incredible as living. One day we suddenly take the fact that we exist for granted - and then, yes, then we don’t think about it anymore until we are about to leave the world again.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Thinking #People #One Day

The question of whether a thing is right or wrong, good or bad, must always be considered in relation to a persons needs.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Needs #Relation #Persons

There is always Joker to see through the delusion. Generation succeeds generation, but there is a fool walking the earth who is never ravaged by time.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Generations #Earth #Fool

Life is short for those who are truly able to understand that one day the entire world will come to a complete end. Not everyone is capable of that. Not everyone has the ability to comprehend what going away for all eternity really implies. There are too many distractions, hour by hour, minute by minute, to hinder such an understanding.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Life Is Short #Understanding #Going Away

Life is both sad and solemn. We are led into a wonderful world, we meet one another here, greet each other---and wander together for a brief moment. Then we lose each other and disappear as suddenly and unreasonably as we arrived.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Together #World #Life Is

It's not a silly question if you can't answer it.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Silly #Answers

A philosopher knows that in reality he knows very little. That is why he constantly strives to achieve true insight. Socrates was one of these rare people. He knew that he knew nothing about life and about the world. And now comes the important part: it troubled him that he knew so little.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Reality #People #Important

Health is the natural condition. When sickness occurs, it is a sign that Nature has gone off course because of a physical or mental imbalance. The road to health for everyone is through moderation, harmony, and a 'sound mind in a sound body'.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Mind #Balance #Sound

Acting responsibly is not a matter of strengthening our reason but of deepening our feelings for the welfare of others.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Feelings #Acting #Matter

I believe there is something of the divine mystery in everything that exists. We can see it sparkle in a sunflower or a poppy. We sense more of the unfathomable mystery in a butterfly that flutters from a twig--or in a goldfish swimming in a bowl. But we are closest to God in our own soul. Only there can we become one with the greatest mystery of life. In truth, at very rare moments we can experience that we ourselves are that divine mystery.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Believe #Butterfly #Swimming

... the only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder...
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Philosopher #Wonder #Faculty

And although I have seen nothing but black crows in my life, it doesn't mean that there's no such thing as a white crow. Both for a philosopher and for a scientist it can be important not to reject the possibility of finding a white crow. You might almost say that hunting for 'the white crow' is science's principal task.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Mean #Hunting #White

Our lives are part of a unique adventure... Nevertheless, most of us think the world is 'normal' and are constantly hunting for something abnormal--like angels or Martians. But that is just because we don't realize the world is a mystery. As for myself, I felt completely different. I saw the world as an amazing dream. I was hunting for some kind of explanation of how everything fit together.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Dream #Adventure #Angel

going only part of the way is not the same as going the wrong way
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Way

Philosophy is the opposite of fairy tales
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Philosophy #Opposites #Fairy Tale

Socrates himself said, 'One thing only I know, and this is that I know nothing.' Remember this statement, because it is an admission that is rare, even among philosophers. Moreover, it can be so dangerous to say in public that it can cost you your life. The most subversive people are those who ask questions. Giving answers is not nearly as threatening. Any one question can be more explosive than a thousand answers.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#People #Giving #Answers

Wisest is she who knows she does not know.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Philosophy #Science #Doe

To wonder about life is not something we learn; it is something we forget.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Wonder #Life Is #Forget

For nature is good, an man is 'by nature' good; it is civilization which ruins him
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Men #Civilization #Ruins

Moreover, nature's blocks had to be eternal-because nothing can come from nothing.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Block

History is one long chain of reflections. Hegel also indicated certain rules that apply for this chain of reflections. Anyone studying history in depth will observe that a thought is usually proposed on the basis of other, previously proposed thoughts. But as soon as one thought is proposed, it will be contradicted by another. A tension arises between these two opposite ways of thinking. But the tension is resolved by the proposal of a third thought which accommodates the best of both points of view. Hegel calls this a dialectic process
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Thinking #Reflection #Views

What Plato was really asking was perhaps why a horse was a horse, and not, for example, a cross between a horse and a pig.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Horse #Plato #Pigs

All beauty that surrounds us must one day perish.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#One Day #Surround

Life is like a huge lottery in which only the winning tickets are visible.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Winning #Life Is Like #Tickets

Over the entrance to the temple at Delphi was a famous inscription: KNOW THYSELF! It reminded visitors that man must never believe himself to be more than mortal - and that no man can escape his destiny.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Believe #Destiny #Men

Love, your own witch-daughter, Queen of the Mirror and the Highest Protector of Irony
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Daughter #Queens #Love You

As a Roman philosopher, Cicero, said of him a few hundred years later, Socrates 'called philosophy down from the sky and established her in the towns and introduced her into homes and forced her to investigate life, ethics, good and evil.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Philosophy #Home #Years

The sophists were as a rule men who had traveled widely and seen different forms of government. Both conventions and local laws in the city-states could vary widely. This led the Sophists to raise the question of what was natural and what was socially induced. By doing this, they paved the way for social criticism in the city-state of Athens.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Men #Law #Cities

It was all too easy to make things up, it was like skating on thin ice, it was like doing dainty pirouettes on a brittle crust over water thousands of fathoms deep.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Ice #Water #Skating

I want to understand more about the world while Im still here.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#World #Want #Stills

I wrote Sophies World in three months, but I was only writing and sleeping. I work for 14 hours a day when Im working on a book.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Book #Writing #Sleep

Let me put it more precisely: The ability to give birth is a natural characteristic. In the same way, everybody can grasp philosophical truths if they just use their innate reason.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Philosophical #Giving #Use

Where did the world come from? The question has an answer, even though I cannot get to it. It is a good question. It is like a crime that has not been solved. There is an answer, even if police do not know it.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Police #Answers #World

Life consists of a long chain of coincidences.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Long #Coincidence #Chains

I'm not just some butterfly for you to catch.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Butterfly

When we die, as when the scenes have been fixed on to celluloid and the scenery is pulled down and burnt — we are phantoms in the memories of our descendants. Then we are ghosts, my dear, then we are myths. But still we are together. We are the past together, we are a distant past. Beneath the dome of the mysterious stars, I still hear your voice.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Stars #Memories #Past

If an overgrown child draws something on a piece of paper, you can't ask the paper what the drawing is supposed to represent.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Children #Drawing #Pieces

You might say that the very best that can happen is to have energetic opponents.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Opponents #Might #Energetic

A lot of people experience the world with the same incredulity as when a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat.…We know that the world is not all sleight of hand and deception because we are in it, we are part of it. Actually we are the white rabbit being pulled out of the hat. The only difference beween us and the white rabbit is that the rabbit does not realize it is taking part in a magic trick.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Hands #White #Differences

... perhaps the clock hands had become so tired of going in the same direction year after year that they had suddenly begun to go the opposite way instead...
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Tired #Hands #Years

The stupidest thing she knew was for people to act like they knew all about the things they knew absolutely nothing about.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#People #Stupidest

Maybe we can comprehend a flower or an insect, but we can never comprehend ourselves. Even less can we expect to comprehend the universe.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Flower #Insects #Universe

A joker is a little fool who is different from everyone else. He's not a club, diamond, heart, or spade. He's not an eight or a nine, a king or a jack. He is an outsider. He is placed in the same pack as the other cards, but he doesn't belong there. Therefore, he can be removed without anybody missing him.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Kings #Heart #Missing Him

Where both reason and experience fall short, there occurs a vacuum that can be filled by faith.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Fall #Vacuums #Reason

Socrates, whose mother was a midwife, used to say that his art was like the art of the midwife. She does not herself give birth to the child, but she is there to help during its delivery. Similarly, Socrates saw his task as helping people to 'give birth' to correct insight, since real understanding must come from within. . . . Everybody can grasp philosophical truths if they just use their innate reason.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Mother #Art #Children

Athens is like a sluggish horse, and I am the gadfly trying to sting it into life.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Horse #Trying #Athens

People are, generally speaking, either dead certain or totally indifferent.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#People #Sociology #Certain

The rearing of children is considered too important to be left to the individual and should be the responsibility of the state.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Children #Responsibility #Important

Many of the Nazis were convicted after the war, but they were not convicted for being 'unreasonable'. They were convicted for being gruesome murderers.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#War #Nazi #Murderer

To prove religious faith by human reason is rationalistic claptrap.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Religious #Reason #Prove

It is by no means certain that we advance our philosophical quest by reading Plato or Aristotle. It may increase our knowledge of history but not of the world.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Plato #Reading #Philosophical

We can be hindered in our development and our personal growth by political conditions. Outer circumstances can constrain us. Only when we are free to develop our innate abilities can we live as free beings. But we are just as much determined by inner potential and outer opportunities as the Stone Age boy on the Rhine, the lion in Africa, or the apple tree in the garden.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Opportunity #Garden #Boys

The truth is that I feel totally helpless, or totally inconsolable, to be more honest. I’m not trying to hide it, but it’s something you’re not to worry about.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Fear #Worry #Trying

Dear Hilde, if the human brain was simple enough for us to understand, we would still be so stupid that we couldn't understand it. Love, Dad.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Dad #Stupid #Simple

But all fairytales have rules, and perhaps it’s their rules that actually distinguish one fairytale from the other. These rules never need to be understood. They only need to be followed. If not, what they promise won’t come true.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Promise #Needs #Fairytale

When we gaze at a star in the Milky Way which is 50,000 light-years away from our sun, we are looking back 50,000 years in time." "The idea is much too big for my little head." "The only way we can look out into space, then, is to look back in time. We can never know what the universe is like now. We only know what it was like then. When we look up at a star that is thousands of light-years away, we are really traveling thousands of years back in the history of space.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Stars #Ideas #Space

If I’d chosen never to the foot inside the great fairytale, I’d never have known what I’ve lost. Do you see what I’m getting at? Sometimes it’s worse for us human beings to lose something dear to us than never to have had it at all.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Feet #Fairytale #Sometimes

But she’d managed to find her way into our reality, perhaps because she had an important mission here, perhaps because she was here to save us from what people call the monotony of life.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Reality #People #Important

a sensation is always the same as a piece of news, and a piece of news never lives long.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Long #News #Pieces

Although you may not stumble across a Martian in the garden, you might stumble across yourself. The day that happens, you'll probably also scream a little. And that'll be perfectly all right, because it's not every day you realize you're a living planet dweller on a little island in the universe.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Garden #Islands #Might

Ladies and Gentlemen...we are floating in Space!
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Space #Gentleman #Floating

Yes, we too are stardust.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Stardust

If just one of [those people] experiences life as a crazy adventure--and I mean that he, or she, experiences this every single day... Then he or she is a joker in a pack of cards.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Crazy #Adventure #Mean

When you realize there is something you don't understand, then you're generally on the right path to understanding all kinds of things.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Philosophy #Understanding #Path

I have gone around observing your activities from the outside. Because of this I have also been able to see things to which you have been blind... Every morning you have gone to work, but you have never been fully awake. Of course, you have seen the sun and the moon, the stars in the sky, and everything that moves, but you haven't really seen it at all. It is different for the Joker, because he was put into this world with a flaw: He sees too clearly and too much.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Morning #Stars #Moving

Only philosophers embark on this perilous expedition to the outermost reaches of language and existence. Some of them fall off, but others cling on desperately and yell at the people nestling deep in the snug softness, stuffing themselves with delicious food and drink. 'Ladies and Gentlemen,' they yell, 'we are floating in space!' But none of the people down there care
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Fall #Space #People

We can't own each other's past. The questioin is whether we have a future together.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Past #Together #Futures Together

There exists a world. In terms of probability this borders on the impossible. It would have been far more likely if, by chance, there was nothing at all. Then, at least, no one would have began asking why there was nothing.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Borders #Asking #World

I am really more interested in questions than in giving answers.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Giving #Answers

That fact that Athens could condemn its noblest citizen to death did more than make a profound impression on him. It was to shape the course of his entire philosophic endeavor.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Profound #Citizens #Shapes

If there is a god, he is not only a wizard at leaving clues behind. More than anything, he's a master of concealment. And the world is not something that gives itself away. The heavens still keep their secrets. There is little gossip amongst the stars. But no one has forgotten the Big Bang yet. Since then, silence has reigned supreme, and every thing there is moving away. One can still come across a moon. Or a comet. Just don't expect friendly greetings. No visiting cards are printed in space.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Stars #Moving #Moon

It takes billions of years to create a human being. And it takes only a few seconds to die.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Philosophical #Years #Billions

The soul yearns to fly home on the wings of love to the world of ideas. It longs to be freed from the chains of the body.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Home #Ideas #Wings

the very best that can happen is to have energetic opponents. The more extreme they become, the more powerful the reaction they will have to face.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Powerful #Opponents #Faces

There are five billion people living on this planet. But you fall in love with one particular person, and you won't swap her for any other.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Falling In Love #People #Planets

Every single morning I wake with a bang,' he said. 'It's as though the fact that I am alive is injected into me; I am a character in a fairytale, bursting with life.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Morning #Character #Fairytale

It is different for us mortals. We are the ones who become old and grey. We are the ones who become worn at the seams and disappear. But not our dreams. They can live on in other people even after we have gone.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Dream #People #Different

He could very likely have appealed for leniency. At least he could have saved his life by agreeing to leave Athens. But had he done this he would not have been Socrates. He valued his conscience--and the truth-- higher than life.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Done #Athens #Leniency

Hegel said that `truth` is subjective, thus rejecting the existence of any `truth` above or beyond human reason. All knowledge is human knowledge.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Hegel #Truth Is #Reason

According to Kierkegaard, rather than searching for the Truth with a capital T, it is more important to find the kind of truths that are meaningful to the individual's life. It is important to find `the truth for me`.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Meaningful #Important #Kind

Kierkegaard also said that truth is `subjective`. By this he did not mean it doesn't matter what we think or believe. He meant that the really important truths are personal. Only these truths are `true for me`.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Believe #Mean #Thinking

Throughout the entire history of philosophy, philosophers have sought to discover what man is - or what human nature is. But Sartre believed that man has no such eternal nature to fall back on. It is therefore useless to search for the meaning of life in general. We are condemned to improvise. We are like actors dragged onto the stage without having learned our lines, with no script and no prompter to whisper stage directions to us. We must decide for ourselves how to live.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Philosophy #Fall #Men

(As human beings) We see everything everything in a glass, darkly. Sometimes we can peer through the glass and catch a glimpse of what is on the other side. If we were to polish the glass clean, we'd see much more. But then we would no longer see ourselves.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Glasses #Sides #Glimpse

I've nothing against eye make-up and lipstick. But the fact is that we’re actually living on a planet in space. For me that’s an extraordinary thought. It’s mind-boggling just to think about the existence of space at all. But there are girls who can’t see the universe for eye liner.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Girl #Eye #Thinking

Then you have a big problem, because a human is a thinking animal. If you don't think, you're not really a human.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Animal #Thinking #Problem

We are the living planet!
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Life #Planets

The universe is a great mystery.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Mystery #Universe

We do not believe in the notion of God's chosen people. We laugh at this people's fancies and weep over its misdeeds. To act as God's chosen people is not only stupid and arrogant, but a crime against humanity. We call it racism.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Stupid #Believe #Racism

A Russian cosmonaut and a Russian brain surgeon were once discussing Christianity. The brain surgeon was a Christian, but the cosmonaut wasn’t. ‘I have been in outer space many times,’ bragged the cosmonaut, ‘but I have never seen any angels.’ The brain surgeon stared in amazement, but then he said, ‘And I have operated on many intelligent brains, but I have never seen a single thought.
-- Jostein Gaarder

#Christian #Angel #Intelligent