Jostein Gaarder Quotes
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A sensation is always the same as a piece of news, and a piece of news never lives long.
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All beauty that surrounds us must one day perish.
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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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I want to understand more about the world while Im still here.
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Wisest is she who knows she does not know.
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I am really more interested in questions than in giving answers.
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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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We can't own each other's past. The questioin is whether we have a future together.
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You might say that the very best that can happen is to have energetic opponents.
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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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Some are more equal than others.
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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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Acting responsibly is not a matter of strengthening our reason but of deepening our feelings for the welfare of others.
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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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For nature is good, an man is 'by nature' good; it is civilization which ruins him.
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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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People are, generally speaking, either dead certain or totally indifferent.
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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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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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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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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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I think about my editor when I write. She's a good friend, too.
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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.