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Athens is like a sluggish horse, and I am the gadfly trying to sting it into life.

Jostein Gaarder

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Jostein Gaarder
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: August 8
Author
Novelist
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Teacher
Writer
Oslo
Norway
Life
Like
Gadflies
Sluggish
Athens
Sting
Horse
Trying

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For nature is good, an man is 'by nature' good it is civilization which ruins him
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The only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder.
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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.
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It is by no means certain that we advance our philosophical quest by reading Plato or Aristotle. It may increase our knowledge of history but not of the world.
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Where both reason and experience fall short, there occurs a vacuum that can be filled by faith.
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But understanding will always require some effort. You probably wouldn't admire a friend who was good at everything if it cost her no effort.
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going only part of the way is not the same as going the wrong way
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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.
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As a Roman philosopher, Cicero, said of him a few hundred years later, Socrates 'called philosophy down from the sky and established her in the towns and introduced her into homes and forced her to investigate life, ethics, good and evil.
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The stupidest thing she knew was for people to act like they knew all about the things they knew absolutely nothing about.
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It is different for us mortals. We are the ones who become old and grey. We are the ones who become worn at the seams and disappear. But not our dreams. They can live on in other people even after we have gone.
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But all fairytales have rules, and perhaps it’s their rules that actually distinguish one fairytale from the other. These rules never need to be understood. They only need to be followed. If not, what they promise won’t come true.
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There is always Joker to see through the delusion. Generation succeeds generation, but there is a fool walking the earth who is never ravaged by time.
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Then you have a big problem, because a human is a thinking animal. If you don't think, you're not really a human.
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The question of whether a thing is right or wrong, good or bad, must always be considered in relation to a persons needs.
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Philosophy is the opposite of fairy tales
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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
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People are, generally speaking, either dead certain or totally indifferent.
Jostein Gaarder
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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
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You might say that the very best that can happen is to have energetic opponents.
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