Jostein Gaarder Quotes

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

She was a stranger. She came from a more beautiful fairytale than ours. But she’d managed to find her way into our reality, perhaps because she was here to save us from what people sometimes call ‘the monotony of life.’ Until that moment I’d been completely ignorant of such missionary work. I’d thoughts there was only two types people at least. There was the Orange Girl, and there were the rest of us.

~ Jostein Gaarder

Life is both sad and solemn. We are led into a wonderful world, we meet one another here, greet each other - and wander together for a brief moment. Then we lose each other and disappear as suddenly and unreasonably as we arrived.

~ Jostein Gaarder

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.

~ Jostein Gaarder

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

~ Jostein Gaarder

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

~ Jostein Gaarder

A composition—and every work of art is one—is created in a wondrous interplay between imagination and reason, or between mind and reflection. For there will always be an element of chance in the creative process.

~ Jostein Gaarder

But if the history of mankind was her own history, in a way she was thousands of years old.

~ Jostein Gaarder

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

But the dream of something unlikely has its own special name. We call it hope.

~ Jostein Gaarder

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

... 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...

~ Jostein Gaarder

Was Jesus a christian?

~ Jostein Gaarder

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

I didn't feel lonely until there was something to yearn for. Loneliness and longing are two sides of the same coin.

~ Jostein Gaarder

Thus the 'fortune-teller' is trying to foresee something that is really quite unforeseeable. This is characteristic of all forms of foreseeing. And precisely because what they 'see' is so vague, it is hard to repudiate fortune-tellers' claims.

~ Jostein Gaarder

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

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.

~ Jostein Gaarder

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

~ Jostein Gaarder

In the eyeball there is a clash between creation and reflection. The two-way globes of sight are magical revolving doors where the creative spirit meets itself in the created spirit. The eye that surveys the universe is the universe's own eye.

~ Jostein Gaarder

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

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

~ Jostein Gaarder

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

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

~ Jostein Gaarder

Even though God could create all kinds of things, he could hardly create himself before he had a self to create with. So there was only one possibility left: God had always existed. But she had already rejected that possibility! Everything that existed had to have a beginning.

~ Jostein Gaarder

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

~ Jostein Gaarder

We don't learn anything there [school]. The difference between schoolteachers and philosophers us that school-teachers think they know a lot of stuff that they try to force down our throats. Philosophers try to figure things out together with the pupils

~ Jostein Gaarder

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

Everything you know gained from experience

~ Jostein Gaarder

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

~ Jostein Gaarder

I wonder whether the Christmas feeling has anything to do with the sixth sense. Perhaps we're a little more the angels at Christmas than we are during the rest of the year. And Christmas is about all the other senses. I can smell Christmas, I can taste Christmas, and I can see and hear it.

~ Jostein Gaarder

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!

~ Jostein Gaarder

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

~ Jostein Gaarder

The one who says he doesn't understand anything about art, doesn't know himself.

~ Jostein Gaarder

No day is alike - I do many other things, and I'm very active in the environmental movement.

~ Jostein Gaarder