Top 150 Jostein Gaarder Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Ich habe Angst, Georg. ich habe Angst davor, aus dieser Welt verstossen zu werden. Ich habe Angst vor Abenden die diesem, die ich nicht leben darf.”

— Jostein Gaarder

102. “I want to understand more about the world while Im still here.”

— Jostein Gaarder

103. “But most people are content with a life among shadows. They give no thought to what is casting the shadows. They think shadows are all there are, never realizing even that they are, in fact, shadows. And thus they pay no heed to the immortality of their own soul.”

— Jostein Gaarder

104. “Banyak orang sangat menderita, sehingga mungkin mereka sudah mati karena kesedihan seandainya saja mereka tidak memimpikan sesuatu yang indah di sela-sela penderitaan mereka.”

— Jostein Gaarder

105. “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.”

— Jostein Gaarder

106. “Don’t you think it’s a small mystery that birds can twitter so loudly that they can hear each other’s song from several miles away? Those tiny bundles are like living flutes, playing non-stop on themselves.”

— Jostein Gaarder

107. “One can say without exaggeration that Descartes was the father of modern philosophy.”

— Jostein Gaarder

108. “We cry when something is sad. Then we often shed a tear when something’s beautiful as well. When something’s funny or ugly, we laugh. Perhaps we are sad when something is beautiful because we know that it won’t last for ever. Then, we start laughing when something is ugly because we understand that it’s only a joke.”

— Jostein Gaarder

109. “But she who wins the lot of life must also draw the lot of death, since the lot of life is death.”

— Jostein Gaarder

110. “Perhaps we’re sad when something’s beautiful because we know it won’t last forever.”

— Jostein Gaarder

111. “She sent me a sunny smile, and what a smile, George; it was a smile that could have melted the whole world, because if the whole world had seen it, it would have had the power to stop all wars and hatred on the face of the planet, or at lease there would have been some long ceasefires.”

— Jostein Gaarder

112. “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.”

— Jostein Gaarder

113. “You might say that the very best that can happen is to have energetic opponents.”

— Jostein Gaarder

114. “The most subversive people are those who ask questions. Giving answers is not nearly as threatening.”

— Jostein Gaarder

115. “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.”

— Jostein Gaarder

116. “A true philosopher must never give up.”

— Jostein Gaarder

117. “As material beings we belong wholly to the natural world. We are therefore subject to causal relations. As such, we have no free will. But as rational beings we have a part in what Kant calls das Ding an sich – that is, the world as it exists in itself, independent of our sensory impressions. Only when we follow our ‘practical reason’ – which enables us to make moral choices – do we exercise our free will, because when we conform to moral law, it is we who make the law we are conforming to.”

— Jostein Gaarder

118. “At School she had trouble concentrating on what the teacher said. They seemed to talk only about unimportant things. Why couldn’t they talk about what a human being is – or about what the world is and how it came into being?”

— Jostein Gaarder

119. “The greatest thing of all is love. Time can’t pale that as easily as it fades old memories.”

— Jostein Gaarder

120. “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.”

— Jostein Gaarder

121. “Perhaps we aren’t fully developed. The physical development of human beings necessarily had to precede the psychological. Perhaps the physical nature of the universe is merely a necessary external material for its own self-awareness.”

— Jostein Gaarder

122. “Many of the Nazis were convicted after the war, but they were not convicted for being ‘unreasonable’. They were convicted for being gruesome murderers.”

— Jostein Gaarder

123. “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.”

— Jostein Gaarder

124. “Long before the child learns to talk properly... the world will have become a habit. A pity, if you ask me.”

— Jostein Gaarder

125. “There might be lots of different ways of getting to the top of the mountain, but the mountain itself would stay exactly the same. And we must have been fairly alike to begin with, because each of us is a kind of mountain climber. There, at the top of that mountain, we might make a big pile of stones together. Then we might sit down and rest after the long climb. For once we might forget all our worries, large and small. We would have left them behind in the valleys.”

— Jostein Gaarder

126. “The old Chinese sage Chuang-tzu, for example, said: Once I dreamed I was a butterfly, and now I no longer know whether I am Chuang-tzu, who dreamed I was a butterfly, or whether I am a butterfly dreaming that I am Chuang-tzu.”

— Jostein Gaarder

127. “It is Plato’s portrait of Socrates that has inspired thinkers in the Western world for nearly 2.500 years.”

— Jostein Gaarder

128. “I am really more interested in questions than in giving answers.”

— Jostein Gaarder

129. “But if two people do almost nothing except search for one another, it’s hardly surprising if they run across each other by chance.”

— Jostein Gaarder

130. “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.”

— Jostein Gaarder

131. “Although I’ve always been easily led by my imagination, I was, and I remain, a rational person.”

— Jostein Gaarder

132. “I think about my editor when I write. She’s a good friend, too.”

— Jostein Gaarder

133. “Sophie liked her beautiful story. If she had not known any other explanation for the changing seasons, she felt sure she would have come to believe her own story in the end. She understood that people had always felt a need to explain the processes of nature. Perhaps they could not live without such explanations. And that they made up all those myths in the time before there was anything called science.”

— Jostein Gaarder

134. “We are the universe.”

— Jostein Gaarder

135. “Only when we are free to develop our innate abilities can we live as free beings.”

— Jostein Gaarder

136. “The history of ideas is like a drama in many acts.”

— Jostein Gaarder

137. “Then she sat down on a kitchen stool with the mysterious letter in her hand. Who are you? She had no idea. She was Sophie Amundsen, of course, but who was that?”

— Jostein Gaarder

138. “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.”

— Jostein Gaarder

139. “Thor – the Batman or James Bond of the gods – has once again conquered the forces of evil.”

— Jostein Gaarder

140. “Sophie could remember situations when her mother or the teachers at school had tried to teach her something that she hadn’t been receptive to. And whenever she had really learned something, it was when she had somehow contributed to it herself.”

— Jostein Gaarder

141. “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

142. “What does it take to live a good life?” The philosopher had written something about this quite early on in the course. Everybody needs food, warmth, love, and care. Such basics.”

— Jostein Gaarder

143. “Travelling brings you further out to the world. Dreaming draws you further inside it. But maybe we can’t travel in more than one direction at once.”

— Jostein Gaarder

144. “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.”

— Jostein Gaarder

145. “One of the main concerns of philosophy is to warn people against jumping to conclusions.”

— Jostein Gaarder

146. “Nowadays, people of many lands and cultures are being intermingled more and more. Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists may live in the same apartment building. In which case it is more important to accept each other’s beliefs than to ask why everyone does not believe the same thing.”

— Jostein Gaarder

147. “I said that one of the most infectious things I know is laughter. 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.”

— Jostein Gaarder

148. “At this very moment we are experiencing the consequences of man-made climate change. They are dramatic. However, opinion polls indicate that the people of this world are not particularly concerned. One.”

— Jostein Gaarder

149. “Shame can only exist if there is someone to see you feel it. So in a way, feeling shame is a luxury: only those living with a certain degree of social network are in a position to carry its weight.”

— Jostein Gaarder

150. “I can no longer bear the thought of being the uninvited guest in other people’s lives.”

— Jostein Gaarder