334 Quotes by Jostein Gaarder

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Maybe the imagination creates what is new, but the imagination does not make the actual selection. The imagination does not “compose.” 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. You have to turn the sheep loose before you can start to herd them.

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.

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.