Jostein Gaarder Quotes
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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.
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(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.
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An answer is always on the stretch of road that is behind you. Only a question can point the way forward.
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I want to understand more about the world while Im still here.
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We are thrown together with a sprinkling of stardust.
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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.
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Wisest is she who knows she does not know.
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We can't own each other's past. The questioin is whether we have a future together.
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I am really more interested in questions than in giving answers.
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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.
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People are, generally speaking, either dead certain or totally indifferent.
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You might say that the very best that can happen is to have energetic opponents.
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Acting responsibly is not a matter of strengthening our reason but of deepening our feelings for the welfare of others.
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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.
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For nature is good, an man is 'by nature' good; it is civilization which ruins him.
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Some are more equal than others.
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How terribly sad it was that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as extraordinary as living.
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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.
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Hegel said that `truth` is subjective, thus rejecting the existence of any `truth` above or beyond human reason. All knowledge is human knowledge.
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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.
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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.
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The question of whether a thing is right or wrong, good or bad, must always be considered in relation to a persons needs.
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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.
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If we don't know where we are going, it can be helpful to know where we come from.