Jostein Gaarder Quotes
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People are, generally speaking, either dead certain or totally indifferent.
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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.
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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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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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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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Wisest is she who knows she does not know.
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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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Acting responsibly is not a matter of strengthening our reason but of deepening our feelings for the welfare of others.
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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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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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I am really more interested in questions than in giving answers.
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You might say that the very best that can happen is to have energetic opponents.
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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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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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Some are more equal than others.
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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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The only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder.
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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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A lot of people experience the world with the same incredulity as when a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat.…We know that the world is not all sleight of hand and deception because we are in it, we are part of it. Actually we are the white rabbit being pulled out of the hat. The only difference beween us and the white rabbit is that the rabbit does not realize it is taking part in a magic trick.
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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.