334 Quotes by Jostein Gaarder

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

It is not easy, for example, to surgically remove a delusion. It grows too deep, as it were, for surgery.