Top 100 Jostein Gaarder Quotes
#1. If our brains were as simple as we could understand them, than we would be so stupid that we couldn't understand them again.
Jostein Gaarder
#2. Who are you?
Where does the world come from?
What annoying questions! And anyway where did the letters come from? That was just as mysterious, almost.
Jostein Gaarder
#3. A composition - and every work of art is one - is created in a wondrous interplay between imagination and reason, or between mind and reflection. For there will always be an element of chance in the creative process.
Jostein Gaarder
#5. For nature is good, an man is 'by nature' good; it is civilization which ruins him
Jostein Gaarder
#6. 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
#7. In the year 399 B.C.[E.] he was accused of "introducing new gods and corrupting the youth," as well as not believing in the accepted gods. With a slender majority, a jury of five hundred found him guilty.
Jostein Gaarder
#8. 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
#9. WHEN WE EVENTUALLY ARRIVED in Venice late in the afternoon, we had to park the car in a large lot before we were allowed to enter the town itself, because Venice doesn't have a single proper street.
Jostein Gaarder
#10. We don't learn anything there [school]. The difference between schoolteachers and philosophers us that school-teachers think they know a lot of stuff that they try to force down our throats. Philosophers try to figure things out together with the pupils
Jostein Gaarder
#12. I wrote 'Sophie's World' in three months, but I was only writing and sleeping. I work for 14 hours a day when I'm working on a book.
Jostein Gaarder
#14. It is extraordinary to think about. We still speak of Socratic or Platonic philosophy, but actually being Plato or Socrates is quite another matter.
Jostein Gaarder
#15. You might say that the very best that can happen is to have energetic opponents.
Jostein Gaarder
#16. But it is possible that a completely different author is somewhere writing a book about a UN Major Albert Knag, who is writing a book for his daughter Hilde. This book is about a certain Alberto Knox who suddenly begins to send humble philosophical lectures to Sophie Amundsen, 3 Clover Close.
Jostein Gaarder
#18. (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
#19. Nothing is ever actually invented by the mind. The mind puts things together and constructs false ideas
Jostein Gaarder
#20. The rearing of children is considered too important to be left to the individual and should be the responsibility of the state.
Jostein Gaarder
#21. The stupidest thing she knew was for people to act like they knew all about the things they knew absolutely nothing about.
Jostein Gaarder
#22. Socrates (770-399 B.C.[E.]) is possibly the most enigmatic figure in the entire history of philosophy. He never wrote a single line. Yet he is one of the philosophers who has had the greatest influence on European thought, not least because of the dramatic manner of his death.
Jostein Gaarder
#23. Moreover, nature's blocks had to be eternal-because nothing can come from nothing.
Jostein Gaarder
#24. Sophie saw that the philosopher was right. Grownups took the world for granted. They had let themselves be lulled into the enchanted sleep of their humdrum existence once and for all. 'You've just grown so used to the world that nothing surprises you any more.
Jostein Gaarder
#25. 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
#27. Plato's point is that we can never have true knowledge of anything that is in a constant state of change. We can only have opinions about things that belong to the world of the senses, tangible things. We can only have true knowledge if things that can be understood with our reason.
Jostein Gaarder
#28. But it's important to be happy about the little you have. However little it is, it's infinitely more than nothing.
Jostein Gaarder
#29. Only when we are free to develop our innate abilities can we live as free beings.
Jostein Gaarder
#30. 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
#31. All stars fall at some time. But a star is only a tiny spark from the great beacon in the sky.
Jostein Gaarder
#32. Love, your own witch-daughter, Queen of the Mirror and the Highest Protector of Irony
Jostein Gaarder
#33. The harder you try to forget something, the more you think about it unconsciously.
Jostein Gaarder
#34. 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
#35. Not everybody can let himself drift along the flow of history. Some of us have to stop to pick up what's washed up on the banks of the river.
Jostein Gaarder
#37. The earliest Greek philosopher's criticized Homer's mythology because the gods resembled mortals too much and were just as egotistic and treacherous.
Jostein Gaarder
#38. Philosophers are always trying to climb up the fine hairs of the fur in order to stare right into the magician's eyes.
Jostein Gaarder
#39. The severance between us was surgical, and there was no anaesthetic..
Jostein Gaarder
#40. The greatest thing of all is love. Time can't pale that as easily as it fades old memories.
Jostein Gaarder
#41. It is Plato's portrait of Socrates that has inspired thinkers in the Western world for nearly 2.500 years.
Jostein Gaarder
#42. Her mother was clearly worried. She had started speaking to Sophie in a different tone since this business with the white rabbit and the top hat. Sophie hated to be a worry to her mother, but she just had to go upstairs and keep an eye on the mail box.
Jostein Gaarder
#43. Indeed, there is pain when spring buds burst..."
Wasn't there a Swedish poet who had said something like that? Or was she Finnish?
Jostein Gaarder
#44. THE ONLY THING WE REQUIRE TO BE GOOD PHILOSOPHERS IS THE FACULTY OF WONDER. Babies
Jostein Gaarder
#46. 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
#47. The faculty of vision can vary from person to person. On the other hand, we can rely on what our reason tells us because that is the same for everyone
Jostein Gaarder
#48. But if the history of mankind was her own history, in a way she was thousands of years old.
Jostein Gaarder
#49. But most people are content with a life among shadows. They give no thought to what is casting the shadows. They think shadows are all there are, never realizing even that they are, in fact, shadows. And thus they pay no heed to the immortality of their own soul.
Jostein Gaarder
#50. They thought it was essential to remain skeptical of all inherited truths, the idea being that the individual must find his own answer to every question.
Jostein Gaarder
#51. When we sense something, it is due to the movement of atoms in space. When I see the moon it is because "moon atoms" penetrate my eye.
Jostein Gaarder
#52. The aim of the early Greek philosophers was to find natural, rather than supernatural, explanations for natural processes.
Jostein Gaarder
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. Without imagination, nothing really new will ever be created.
Jostein Gaarder
#56. I think about my editor when I write. She's a good friend, too.
Jostein Gaarder
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. Thus the 'fortune-teller' is trying to foresee something that is really quite unforeseeable. This is characteristic of all forms of foreseeing. And precisely because what they 'see' is so vague, it is hard to repudiate fortune-tellers' claims.
Jostein Gaarder
#60. Sophie could remember situations when her mother or the teachers at school had tried to teach her something that she hadn't been receptive to. And whenever she had really learned something, it was when she had somehow contributed to it herself.
Jostein Gaarder
#61. The philosopher had rescued her. The unknown letter writer had saved her from the triviality of everyday existence.
Jostein Gaarder
#62. 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
#63. If the human brain were simple enough for us to understand, we would still be so stupid that we couldn't understand it.
Jostein Gaarder
#64. Remembering a dream is almost as hard as catching a bird in your hand, but sometimes it's as if the bird comes and sits on your shoulder of its own free will.
Jostein Gaarder
#65. Then she sat down on a kitchen stool with the mysterious letter in her hand. Who are you? She had no idea. She was Sophie Amundsen, of course, but who was that?
Jostein Gaarder
#66. ... a precarious balance between the forces of good and evil ...
Jostein Gaarder
#67. do not control everything that happens in our body - which
Jostein Gaarder
#68. Hello again! As you see, this short course in philosophy will come in handy-sized portions.
Jostein Gaarder
#69. When two people meet," he said, "and one is upside down, it isn't always easy to tell which of them is the right way up.
Jostein Gaarder
#71. The word 'influenza' actually means a malign influence from the stars.
Jostein Gaarder
#72. 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
#73. It takes billions of years to create a human being. And it takes only a few seconds to die.
Jostein Gaarder
#74. The world becomes a dream, and the dream becomes reality.
Jostein Gaarder
#75. Nothing happens accidentally. everything happens through necessity, so it is of little use to complain when fate comes knocking at the door.
Jostein Gaarder
#77. 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
#79. But she who wins the lot of life must also draw the lot of death, since the lot of life is death
Jostein Gaarder
#80. But Dad said we had to try, because neither he or I could bear the thought of living the rest of our lives without her.
Jostein Gaarder
#81. What do you learn in school, Hans Thomas?" Dad asked. "To sit still," I replied. "It's so difficult that we spend many years learning to do it.
Jostein Gaarder
#82. There is an artist in everyone. A dream is, after all, a little work of art, and there are new dreams every night.
Jostein Gaarder
#83. Don't you think it's a small mystery that birds can twitter so loudly that they can hear each other's song from several miles away? Those tiny bundles are like living flutes, playing non-stop on themselves.
Jostein Gaarder
#84. I am really more interested in questions than in giving answers.
Jostein Gaarder
#85. Since the Renaissance, people have had to get used to living their life on a random planet in the vast galaxy.
Jostein Gaarder
#87. Who had jolted Sophie out of her everyday existence and suddenly brought her face to face with the great riddles of the universe?
Jostein Gaarder
#88. 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
#90. If you believed in Christianity or Islam it was called 'faith', but if you believed in astrology or friday the thirteenth it was Superstition!
Jostein Gaarder
#91. The perspectives are so labyrinthine that several possibilities must be kept open. If there is a Creator, what is he? And if there isn't a Creator, what is this world?
Jostein Gaarder
#92. If a baker makes fifty absolutely identical cookies, he must be using the same pastry mold for all of them.
Jostein Gaarder
#93. At this very moment we are experiencing the consequences of man-made climate change. They are dramatic. However, opinion polls indicate that the people of this world are not particularly concerned. One
Jostein Gaarder
#94. The story goes that one day Socrates stood gazing at a stall that sold all
kinds of wares. Finally he said, What a lot of things I don't need!
Jostein Gaarder
#95. 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
#96. Is there such a thing as natural modesty?
Wisest is she who knows she does not know ...
True insight comes from within.
He who knows what is right will do right.
Jostein Gaarder
#97. On the Contrary, to Aristotle the 'forms' were in the things because they were the particular characteristics of these things
Jostein Gaarder
#98. To prove religious faith by human reason is rationalistic claptrap.
Jostein Gaarder
#100. There is no order of things except in the human mind.
Jostein Gaarder
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