Jostein Gaarder Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Jostein Gaarder's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Author Jostein Gaarder's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 109 quotes on this page collected since August 8, 1952! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
  • As a Roman philosopher, Cicero, said of him a few hundred years later, Socrates 'called philosophy down from the sky and established her in the towns and introduced her into homes and forced her to investigate life, ethics, good and evil.

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

    Jostein Gaarder (2003). “The Solitaire Mystery”, p.43, Macmillan
  • How terribly sad it was that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as extraordinary as living.

  • A joker is a little fool who is different from everyone else. He's not a club, diamond, heart, or spade. He's not an eight or a nine, a king or a jack. He is an outsider. He is placed in the same pack as the other cards, but he doesn't belong there. Therefore, he can be removed without anybody missing him.

    Jostein Gaarder (2003). “The Solitaire Mystery”, p.75, Macmillan
  • I have gone around observing your activities from the outside. Because of this I have also been able to see things to which you have been blind... Every morning you have gone to work, but you have never been fully awake. Of course, you have seen the sun and the moon, the stars in the sky, and everything that moves, but you haven't really seen it at all. It is different for the Joker, because he was put into this world with a flaw: He sees too clearly and too much.

    Morning   Stars   Moving  
  • 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.

    Jostein Gaarder (2003). “The Solitaire Mystery”, p.82, Macmillan
  • When we die, as when the scenes have been fixed on to celluloid and the scenery is pulled down and burnt — we are phantoms in the memories of our descendants. Then we are ghosts, my dear, then we are myths. But still we are together. We are the past together, we are a distant past. Beneath the dome of the mysterious stars, I still hear your voice.

    Stars  
    Jostein Gaarder (2010). “Maya”, p.158, Hachette UK
  • Life is like a huge lottery in which only the winning tickets are visible.

  • I believe there is something of the divine mystery in everything that exists. We can see it sparkle in a sunflower or a poppy. We sense more of the unfathomable mystery in a butterfly that flutters from a twig--or in a goldfish swimming in a bowl. But we are closest to God in our own soul. Only there can we become one with the greatest mystery of life. In truth, at very rare moments we can experience that we ourselves are that divine mystery.

  • 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.

    Jostein Gaarder (1997). “The Solitaire Mystery”, Berkley Publishing Group
  • Wasn’t it extraordinary to be in the world right now, wandering around in a wonderful adventure!

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

    Jostein Gaarder (2010). “Sophie's World”, p.23, Hachette UK
  • 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.

    Stars  
  • 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.

    Morning  
    Jostein Gaarder (2003). “The Solitaire Mystery”, p.162, Macmillan
  • There is no order of things except in the human mind.

  • 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.

    Jostein Gaarder (2010). “Sophie's World”, p.43, Hachette UK
  • Life is short for those who are truly able to understand that one day the entire world will come to a complete end. Not everyone is capable of that. Not everyone has the ability to comprehend what going away for all eternity really implies. There are too many distractions, hour by hour, minute by minute, to hinder such an understanding.

    Jostein Gaarder (2010). “The Orange Girl”, p.71, Hachette UK
  • I am really more interested in questions than in giving answers.

  • But all fairytales have rules, and perhaps it’s their rules that actually distinguish one fairytale from the other. These rules never need to be understood. They only need to be followed. If not, what they promise won’t come true.

    Jostein Gaarder (2010). “The Orange Girl”, p.41, Hachette UK
  • Moreover, nature's blocks had to be eternal-because nothing can come from nothing.

  • Over the entrance to the temple at Delphi was a famous inscription: KNOW THYSELF! It reminded visitors that man must never believe himself to be more than mortal - and that no man can escape his destiny.

    Jostein Gaarder (2010). “Sophie's World”, p.55, Hachette UK
  • If we don't know where we are going, it can be helpful to know where we come from.

  • I think about my editor when I write. She's a good friend, too.

  • 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.

  • 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.

    Jostein Gaarder (2010). “The Ringmaster's Daughter”, p.15, Hachette UK
  • We can be hindered in our development and our personal growth by political conditions. Outer circumstances can constrain us. Only when we are free to develop our innate abilities can we live as free beings. But we are just as much determined by inner potential and outer opportunities as the Stone Age boy on the Rhine, the lion in Africa, or the apple tree in the garden.

  • Where did the world come from? The question has an answer, even though I cannot get to it. It is a good question. It is like a crime that has not been solved. There is an answer, even if police do not know it.

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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 109 quotes from the Author Jostein Gaarder, starting from August 8, 1952! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!