Top 100 Quotes About Jostein
#1. I'm more concerned, just as you used to be, with the world as a riddle than with the riddles in the world. I'm more concerned with natural than the supernatural. And I feel more wonder for our inscrutable brain than for all these loose anecdots about the 'extrasensory'.
Jostein Gaarder
#2. Love, your own witch-daughter, Queen of the Mirror and the Highest Protector of Irony
Jostein Gaarder
#3. People are, generally speaking, either dead certain or totally indifferent.
Jostein Gaarder
#4. 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
#5. All stars fall at some time. But a star is only a tiny spark from the great beacon in the sky.
Jostein Gaarder
#6. Nowadays, people of many lands and cultures are being intermingled more and more. Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists may live in the same apartment building. In which case it is more important to accept each other's beliefs than to ask why everyone does not believe the same thing
Jostein Gaarder
#7. If something was natural, she supposed, it was the same for everybody.
Jostein Gaarder
#8. The old Chinese sage Chuang-tzu, for example, said: Once I dreamed I was a butterfly, and now I no longer know whether I am Chuang-tzu, who dreamed I was a butterfly, or whether I am a butterfly dreaming that I am Chuang-tzu.
Jostein Gaarder
#9. 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
#10. He was not only the last of the great Greek philosophers, he was Europe's first great biologist.
Jostein Gaarder
#11. Only when we are free to develop our innate abilities can we live as free beings.
Jostein Gaarder
#12. But it's important to be happy about the little you have. However little it is, it's infinitely more than nothing.
Jostein Gaarder
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#17. All a man can see while looking at the sky are cosmic fossils of thousands and millions of years ago. The only thing an astrologer can predict, is the past.
Jostein Gaarder
#18. Athens is like a sluggish horse, and I am the gadfly trying to sting it into life.
Jostein Gaarder
#19. The expectation of one thing following another does not lie in the things themselves, but in our mind. And expectation is associated with habit.
Jostein Gaarder
#20. When we look up at the sky, we are trying to find the way to ourselves.
Jostein Gaarder
#21. Sophie found philosophy doubly exciting because she was able to follow all the ideas by using her own common sense - without having to remember everything she had learned at school. She decided that philosophy was not something you can learn; but perhaps you can learn to think philosophically.
Jostein Gaarder
#23. 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
#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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#29. THE ONLY THING WE REQUIRE TO BE GOOD PHILOSOPHERS IS THE FACULTY OF WONDER. Babies
Jostein Gaarder
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. To be more precise: although philosophical questions concern us all, we do not all become philosophers.
Jostein Gaarder
#33. 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
#34. Life is like a huge lottery in which only the winning tickets are visible.
Jostein Gaarder
#35. It is Plato's portrait of Socrates that has inspired thinkers in the Western world for nearly 2.500 years.
Jostein Gaarder
#36. The greatest thing of all is love. Time can't pale that as easily as it fades old memories.
Jostein Gaarder
#37. The severance between us was surgical, and there was no anaesthetic..
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. I am in the world now, she thought, but one day I shall be gone.
Jostein Gaarder
#40. 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
#42. 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
#43. But flying across the centuries would have been a hefty job even for a very ironic goose. Crossing the Swedish provinces is far easier
Jostein Gaarder
#44. 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
#45. Thor - the Batman or James Bond of the gods - has once again conquered the forces of evil.
Jostein Gaarder
#47. The harder you try to forget something, the more you think about it unconsciously.
Jostein Gaarder
#48. 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
#49. Nowadays we would perhaps call Plato's state totalitarian.
Jostein Gaarder
#50. I said his line of thought - referring to the philosopher, because this is also a story of men.
Jostein Gaarder
#53. 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
#54. Going only part of the way is not the same as going the wrong way
Jostein Gaarder
#55. It was rather like having been color-blind. She had seen some shadows but had not seen the clear ideas.
Jostein Gaarder
#57. 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
#58. The more self-evident a thing is to one's reason, the more certain it is that it exists
Jostein Gaarder
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. For nature is good, an man is 'by nature' good; it is civilization which ruins him
Jostein Gaarder
#64. Long before the child learns to talk properly ... the world will have become a habit. A pity, if you ask me.
Jostein Gaarder
#65. It's not him who's disturbed. But he likes to disturb others
to shake them out of their rut.
Jostein Gaarder
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. I'm not playing!' Sophie retorted indignantly, 'I'm doing a very important philosophical experiment!
Jostein Gaarder
#70. 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
#71. A sensation is always the same as a piece of news, and a piece of news never lives long.
Jostein Gaarder
#72. I am an extraordinary being, you think. I am a mysterious creature
Jostein Gaarder
#73. The memories float further and further away from that which once created them.
Jostein Gaarder
#74. 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
#75. Plato found mathematics very absorbing because mathematical states never change.
Jostein Gaarder
#76. Empedocles believed that there were two different forces at work in nature. He called them love and strife. Love binds things together, and strife separates them.
Jostein Gaarder
#77. 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
#78. You would realize that all the cookies were formed in the same mold. And what is more, Sophie, you are now seized by the irresistible desire to see this mold. Because clearly, the mold itself must be utter perfection - and in a sense, more beautiful - in comparison with these crude copies.
Jostein Gaarder
#79. Once it is accepted that nothing can change, that nothing can come out of nothing, and that nothing is ever lost, then nature must consist of infinitesimal blocks that can join and separate again.
Jostein Gaarder
#80. Moreover, nature's blocks had to be eternal-because nothing can come from nothing.
Jostein Gaarder
#81. Do you mind telling me what's suddenly so important?'
Sophie just shook her head. 'It's ... it's a secret.'
'Yuck! You're probably in love.
Jostein Gaarder
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. The stupidest thing she knew was for people to act like they knew all about the things they knew absolutely nothing about.
Jostein Gaarder
#85. It is not easy for example to surgically remove a delusion
Jostein Gaarder
#86. 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
#89. But the dream of something unlikely has its own special name. We call it hope.
Jostein Gaarder
#90. The rearing of children is considered too important to be left to the individual and should be the responsibility of the state.
Jostein Gaarder
#91. Nothing is ever actually invented by the mind. The mind puts things together and constructs false ideas
Jostein Gaarder
#92. (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
#94. 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
#95. Acting responsibly is not a matter of strengthening our reason but of deepening our feelings for the welfare of others.
Jostein Gaarder
#96. Hegel believed that the basis of human cognition changed from one generation to the next. There were therefore no 'eternal truths', no timeless reason. The only fixed point philosophy can hold on to is history itself.
Jostein Gaarder
#97. Lots of people have hobbies. some people collect old coins or foreign stamps, some do needlework, others spend most of their spare time on a particular sport.
Jostein Gaarder
#98. You might say that the very best that can happen is to have energetic opponents.
Jostein Gaarder
#99. 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
#100. If we don't know where we are going, it can be helpful to know where we come from.
Jostein Gaarder
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