Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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.
Jostein Gaarder
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Jostein Gaarder
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: August 8
Author
Novelist
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Teacher
Writer
Oslo
Norway
Ice
Pirouettes
Thousands
Fathoms
Deep
Brittle
Water
Dainty
Easy
Crust
Make
Fathom
Things
Skating
Like
Thin
More quotes by Jostein Gaarder
We can't own each other's past. The questioin is whether we have a future together.
Jostein Gaarder
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.
Jostein Gaarder
I think about my editor when I write. She's a good friend, too.
Jostein Gaarder
The only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder.
Jostein Gaarder
I am really more interested in questions than in giving answers.
Jostein Gaarder
You might say that the very best that can happen is to have energetic opponents.
Jostein Gaarder
All beauty that surrounds us must one day perish.
Jostein Gaarder
Maybe we can comprehend a flower or an insect, but we can never comprehend ourselves. Even less can we expect to comprehend the universe.
Jostein Gaarder
Perhaps the clock hands had become so tired of going in the same direction year after year that they had suddenly begun to go the opposite way instead.
Jostein Gaarder
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.
Jostein Gaarder
When you realize there is something you don't understand, then you're generally on the right path to understanding all kinds of things.
Jostein Gaarder
If an overgrown child draws something on a piece of paper, you can't ask the paper what the drawing is supposed to represent.
Jostein Gaarder
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
Ladies and Gentlemen...we are floating in Space!
Jostein Gaarder
...long before the child learns to talk properly-and long before it learns to think philosophically-the world will have become a habit. A pity, if you ask me.
Jostein Gaarder
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.
Jostein Gaarder
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.
Jostein Gaarder
What Plato was really asking was perhaps why a horse was a horse, and not, for example, a cross between a horse and a pig.
Jostein Gaarder
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.
Jostein Gaarder
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.
Jostein Gaarder
