Top 150 Jostein Gaarder Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “He could very likely have appealed for leniency. At least he could have saved his life by agreeing to leave Athens. But had he done this he would not have been Socrates. He valued his conscience – and the truth – higher than life.”

— Jostein Gaarder

52. “I’ve nothing against eye make-up and lipstick. But the fact is that we’re actually living on a planet in space. For me that’s an extraordinary thought. It’s mind-boggling just to think about the existence of space at all. But there are girls who can’t see the universe for eye liner.”

— Jostein Gaarder

53. “What do you learn in school, Hans Thomas?” Dad asked. “To sit still,” I replied. “It’s so difficult that we spend many years learning to do it.”

— Jostein Gaarder

54. “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.”

— Jostein Gaarder

55. “I hope that you have inherited a mind that is open to such small mysteries. They are no less thought-provoking than the stars and galaxies up above. I think it requires more intelligence to create a bumblebee than a black hole.”

— Jostein Gaarder

56. “Moreover, nature’s blocks had to be eternal-because nothing can come from nothing.”

— Jostein Gaarder

57. “It is different for us mortals. We are the ones who become old and grey. We are the ones who become worn at the seams and disappear. But not our dreams. They can live on in other people even after we have gone.”

— Jostein Gaarder

58. “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.”

— Jostein Gaarder

59. “The Enlightenment philosophers thought that once reason and knowledge became widespread, humanity would make great progress. It could only be a question of time before irrationalism and ignorance would give way to an “enlightened” humanity... Today we no longer so convinced that all “developments” are to the good.”

— Jostein Gaarder

60. “It is thus not the individual who forms the language, it is the language which forms the individual.”

— Jostein Gaarder

61. “A philosopher never gets quite used to the world.”

— Jostein Gaarder

62. “Di dunia ini terdapat begitu banyak kalimat seperti banyaknya bintang di langit sana.”

— Jostein Gaarder

63. “Wasn’t the whole world a magic picture which added to itself? For the world changed all the time. It was never completely finished.”

— Jostein Gaarder

64. “But the days are still ours, and we still have many fine moments ahead of us.”

— Jostein Gaarder

65. “Democritus believed that the soul was made up of special round, smooth ‘soul atoms.’ When a human being died, the soul atoms flew in all directions, and could then become part of a new soul formation.”

— Jostein Gaarder

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

— Jostein Gaarder

67. “I never tried to ingratiate myself with great writers. When a great writer has nothing to say, he does something else, like chopping firewood. A great writer doesn’t try to find something to write about, he only writes when he has to. I was no great writer. I’ve always had the need to unload my thoughts, and so had to live with a kind of mental incontinence, but I’ve never felt forced to write a novel. Nor, for that matter, have I ever chopped firewood.”

— Jostein Gaarder

68. “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.”

— Jostein Gaarder

69. “All beauty that surrounds us must one day perish.”

— Jostein Gaarder

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

— Jostein Gaarder

71. “The most subversive people are those who ask questions. Giving answers is not nearly as threatening. Any one question can be more explosive than a thousand answers.”

— Jostein Gaarder

72. “He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth. – GOETHE.”

— Jostein Gaarder

73. “The word ‘influenza’ actually means a malign influence from the stars.”

— Jostein Gaarder

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

— Jostein Gaarder

75. “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

76. “The best way of approaching philosophy is to ask a few philosophical questions: How was the world created? Is.”

— Jostein Gaarder

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

— Jostein Gaarder

78. “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.”

— Jostein Gaarder

79. “If I’d chosen never to the foot inside the great fairytale, I’d never have known what I’ve lost. Do you see what I’m getting at? Sometimes it’s worse for us human beings to lose something dear to us than never to have had it at all.”

— Jostein Gaarder

80. “Rousseau proposed the catchphrase, “We should return to nature.” For nature is good, and man is “by nature” good; it is civilization which ruins him.”

— Jostein Gaarder

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

— Jostein Gaarder

82. “This ‘universal reason’ or ‘universal law’ is something common to us all, and something that everybody is guided by. And yet most people live by their individual reason, thought Heraclitus. In general, he despised his fellow beings. ‘The opinions of most people,’ he said, ‘are like the playthings of infants.’ So in the midst of all nature’s constant flux and opposites, Heraclitus saw an Entity or one-ness, This ‘something,’ which was the source of everything, he called God or logos.”

— Jostein Gaarder

83. “If an overgrown child draws something on a piece of paper, you can’t ask the paper what the drawing is supposed to represent.”

— Jostein Gaarder

84. “Love, your own witch-daughter, Queen of the Mirror and the Highest Protector of Irony.”

— Jostein Gaarder

85. “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

86. “We are thrown together with a sprinkling of stardust.”

— Jostein Gaarder

87. “The aim of the early Greek philosophers was to find natural, rather than supernatural, explanations for natural processes.”

— Jostein Gaarder

88. “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.”

— Jostein Gaarder

89. “There exists a world. In terms of probability this borders on the impossible. It would have been far more likely if, by chance, there was nothing at all. Then, at least, no one would have began asking why there was nothing.”

— Jostein Gaarder

90. “To prove religious faith by human reason is rationalistic claptrap.”

— Jostein Gaarder

91. “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.”

— Jostein Gaarder

92. “Remembering a dream is almost as hard as catching a bird in your hand, but sometimes it’s as if the bird comes and sits on your shoulder of its own free will.”

— Jostein Gaarder

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

— Jostein Gaarder

94. “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.”

— Jostein Gaarder

95. “This unshakable faith in human reason is called rationalism. A rationalist is someone who believes that human reason is the primary source of our knowledge of the world.”

— Jostein Gaarder

96. “We can’t own each other’s past. The questioin is whether we have a future together.”

— Jostein Gaarder

97. “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.”

— Jostein Gaarder

98. “The memories float further and further away from that which once created them.”

— Jostein Gaarder

99. “Tak ada aturan bagi seseorang dalam menulis, demikian juga dalam berpikir.”

— Jostein Gaarder

100. “But it’s important to be happy about the little you have. However little it is, it’s infinitely more than nothing.”

— Jostein Gaarder