334 Quotes by Jostein Gaarder

As long as we are children, we have the ability to experience things around us – but then we grow used to the world. To grow up is to get drunk on sensory experience.

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

A hydrogen atom in a cell at the end of my nose was once part of an elephant’s trunk. A carbon atom in my cardiac muscle was once in the tail of a dinosaur.

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

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.

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 Plato’s portrait of Socrates that has inspired thinkers in the Western world for nearly 2.500 years.

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

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.