Jostein Gaarder Quotes
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All beauty that surrounds us must one day perish.
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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.
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Wisest is she who knows she does not know.
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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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I want to understand more about the world while Im still here.
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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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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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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 am really more interested in questions than in giving answers.
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We are thrown together with a sprinkling of stardust.
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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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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'.
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For nature is good, an man is 'by nature' good; it is civilization which ruins him.
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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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The only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder.
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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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Going only part of the way is not the same as going the wrong way.
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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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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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Some are more equal than others.
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You might say that the very best that can happen is to have energetic opponents.
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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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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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I think about my editor when I write. She's a good friend, too.