Jostein Gaarder Quotes

A state that does not educate and train women is like a man who only trains his right arm.

A hydrogen atom in a cell at the end of my nose was once part of an elephant's trunk. A carbon atom in my cardiac muscle was once in the tail of a dinosaur.

How terribly sad it was that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as extraordinary as living.

The most subversive people are those who ask questions.

The question of whether a thing is right or wrong, good or bad, must always be considered in relation to a persons needs.

An answer is always on the stretch of road that is behind you. Only a question can point the way forward.

Wasn’t it extraordinary to be in the world right now, wandering around in a wonderful adventure!

Since the Renaissance, people have had to get used to living their life on a random planet in the vast galaxy.

We are thrown together with a sprinkling of stardust.

Athens is like a sluggish horse, and I am the gadfly trying to sting it into life.

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.

When we look up at the sky, we are trying to find the way to ourselves.

It's not a silly question if you can't answer it.

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.

Wisest is she who knows she does not know.

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.

People are, generally speaking, either dead certain or totally indifferent.

Acting responsibly is not a matter of strengthening our reason but of deepening our feelings for the welfare of others.

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.

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.

The rearing of children is considered too important to be left to the individual and should be the responsibility of the state.

When you realize there is something you don't understand, then you're generally on the right path to understanding all kinds of things.

All beauty that surrounds us must one day perish.

a sensation is always the same as a piece of news, and a piece of news never lives long.

Hegel said that 'truth' is subjective, thus rejecting the existence of any 'truth' above or beyond human reason. All knowledge is human knowledge.

The only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder.

We can't own each other's past. The questioin is whether we have a future together.

Ladies and Gentlemen...we are floating in Space!

As long as we are children, we have the ability to experience things around us--but then we grow used to the world. To grow up is to get drunk on sensory experience.

It takes billions of years to create a human being. And it takes only a few seconds to die.

going only part of the way is not the same as going the wrong way

If we don't know where we are going, it can be helpful to know where we come from.

Life is like a huge lottery in which only the winning tickets are visible.

We are the living planet!

Life consists of a long chain of coincidences.

The stupidest thing she knew was for people to act like they knew all about the things they knew absolutely nothing about.

Philosophy is the opposite of fairy tales

...long before the child learns to talk properly-and long before it learns to think philosophically-the world will have become a habit. A pity, if you ask me.

Then you have a big problem, because a human is a thinking animal. If you don't think, you're not really a human.

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.

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.

I'm not just some butterfly for you to catch.

I am really more interested in questions than in giving answers.

Love, your own witch-daughter, Queen of the Mirror and the Highest Protector of Irony

Some are more equal than others.

Where both reason and experience fall short, there occurs a vacuum that can be filled by faith.

But she’d managed to find her way into our reality, perhaps because she had an important mission here, perhaps because she was here to save us from what people call the monotony of life.

the very best that can happen is to have energetic opponents. The more extreme they become, the more powerful the reaction they will have to face.

To prove religious faith by human reason is rationalistic claptrap.

The soul yearns to fly home on the wings of love to the world of ideas. It longs to be freed from the chains of the body.