Jostein Gaarder
Jostein Gaarder
Jostein Gaarderis a Norwegian intellectual and author of several novels, short stories and children's books. Gaarder often writes from the perspective of children, exploring their sense of wonder about the world. He often utilizes metafiction in his works and constructs stories within stories. His best known work is the novel Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy. It has been translated into 60 languages; there are over 40 million copies in print...
NationalityNorwegian
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth8 August 1952
CountryNorway
A joker is a little fool who is different from everyone else. He's not a club, diamond, heart, or spade. He's not an eight or a nine, a king or a jack. He is an outsider. He is placed in the same pack as the other cards, but he doesn't belong there. Therefore, he can be removed without anybody missing him.
Socrates, whose mother was a midwife, used to say that his art was like the art of the midwife. She does not herself give birth to the child, but she is there to help during its delivery. Similarly, Socrates saw his task as helping people to 'give birth' to correct insight, since real understanding must come from within. . . . Everybody can grasp philosophical truths if they just use their innate reason.
Athens is like a sluggish horse, and I am the gadfly trying to sting it into life.
People are, generally speaking, either dead certain or totally indifferent.
The rearing of children is considered too important to be left to the individual and should be the responsibility of the state.
a sensation is always the same as a piece of news, and a piece of news never lives long.
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.
Many of the Nazis were convicted after the war, but they were not convicted for being 'unreasonable'. They were convicted for being gruesome murderers.
Where both reason and experience fall short, there occurs a vacuum that can be filled by faith.
Maybe we can comprehend a flower or an insect, but we can never comprehend ourselves. Even less can we expect to comprehend the universe.
You might say that the very best that can happen is to have energetic opponents.
If an overgrown child draws something on a piece of paper, you can't ask the paper what the drawing is supposed to represent.
The stupidest thing she knew was for people to act like they knew all about the things they knew absolutely nothing about.
Hegel said that `truth` is subjective, thus rejecting the existence of any `truth` above or beyond human reason. All knowledge is human knowledge.