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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.

Jostein Gaarder

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Jostein Gaarder
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: August 8
Author
Novelist
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Teacher
Writer
Oslo
Norway
Always
Cost
Wouldn
Friend
Probably
Effort
Understanding
Require
Everything
Admire
Good
Morality

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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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He could very likely have appealed for leniency. At least he could have saved his life by agreeing to leave Athens. But had he done this he would not have been Socrates. He valued his conscience--and the truth-- higher than life.
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Yes, we too are stardust.
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Every single morning I wake with a bang,' he said. 'It's as though the fact that I am alive is injected into me I am a character in a fairytale, bursting with life.
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Acting responsibly is not a matter of strengthening our reason but of deepening our feelings for the welfare of others.
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I think about my editor when I write. She's a good friend, too.
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There are five billion people living on this planet. But you fall in love with one particular person, and you won't swap her for any other.
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Athens is like a sluggish horse, and I am the gadfly trying to sting it into life.
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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.
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The sophists were as a rule men who had traveled widely and seen different forms of government. Both conventions and local laws in the city-states could vary widely. This led the Sophists to raise the question of what was natural and what was socially induced. By doing this, they paved the way for social criticism in the city-state of Athens.
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Although you may not stumble across a Martian in the garden, you might stumble across yourself. The day that happens, you'll probably also scream a little. And that'll be perfectly all right, because it's not every day you realize you're a living planet dweller on a little island in the universe.
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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.
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There is no order of things except in the human mind.
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For nature is good, an man is 'by nature' good it is civilization which ruins him
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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.
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The most subversive people are those who ask questions.
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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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If I’d chosen never to the foot inside the great fairytale, I’d never have known what I’ve lost. Do you see what I’m getting at? Sometimes it’s worse for us human beings to lose something dear to us than never to have had it at all.
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A state that does not educate and train women is like a man who only trains his right arm.
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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.
Jostein Gaarder