Jostein Gaarder Quotes
When we sense something, it is due to the movement of atoms in space. When I see the moon it is because "moon atoms" penetrate my eye.
If an overgrown child draws something on a piece of paper, you can't ask the paper what the drawing is supposed to represent.
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.
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.
Maybe we can comprehend a flower or an insect, but we can never comprehend ourselves. Even less can we expect to comprehend the universe.
That fact that Athens could condemn its noblest citizen to death did more than make a profound impression on him. It was to shape the course of his entire philosophic endeavor.
Perhaps the clock hands had become so tired of going in the same direction year after year that they had suddenly begun to go the opposite way instead.
I wrote Sophies World in three months, but I was only writing and sleeping. I work for 14 hours a day when Im working on a book.
Dear Hilde, if the human brain was simple enough for us to understand, we would still be so stupid that we couldn't understand it. Love, Dad.
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.
Look at the world, Georg, look at the world before you've filled yourself with too much physics and chemistry.
But sorrow can also be contagious. Fear is different. It isn't as communicable as laughter or sadness, and a good thing too. Fear is almost entirely a lonely thing.
Although I've always been easily led by my imagination, I was, and I remain, a rational person.
I no longer feel the need to see and sense more than I've already experienced. I just want so desperately to hang on what I have.
But if the history of mankind was her own history, in a way she was thousands of years old.
But the dream of something unlikely has its own special name. We call it hope.
... perhaps the clock hands had become so tired of going in the same direction year after year that they had suddenly begun to go the opposite way instead...
I didn't feel lonely until there was something to yearn for. Loneliness and longing are two sides of the same coin.
All a man can see while looking at the sky are cosmic fossils of thousands and millions of years ago. The only thing an astrologer can predict, is the past.
The faculty of vision can vary from person to person. On the other hand, we can rely on what our reason tells us because that is the same for everyone
But what is a person, George? How much is a person worth? Are we nothing but dust that is whipped up and spread to the winds?
But if two people do almost nothing except search for one another, it's hardly surprising if they run across each other by chance.
The story goes that one day Socrates stood gazing at a stall that sold allkinds of wares. Finally he said, “What a lot of things I don’t need!
No day is alike - I do many other things, and I'm very active in the environmental movement.
If you believed in Christianity or Islam it was called 'faith', but if you believed in astrology or friday the thirteenth it was Superstition!
People are, generally speaking, either dead certain or totally indifferent (Both types are crawling around deep down in the rabbit's fur!)
It's not him who's disturbed. But he likes to disturb others--to shake them out of their rut.