Jostein Gaarder

“אנו יודעים מאז ומתמיד כי העולם הוא חידה גדולה, וכי בזכותו של כל אחד מאתנו לנסות לפתור חידה זו בדרכו שלו.”

“העולם הוא ראי, ראי אפל.”

“כל אחת מעינינו מהווה חלקה קטנה של מסתורין אלוהי.”

“להיוולד משמעו לקבל במתנה את העולם כולו.”

“דרושה מנה גדושה של אי תלות ושל חירות המחשבה כדי להתנתק מתשוקותינו.”

“יש בכוחה של שאלה אחת להיות הרסנית יותר מאשר אלף תשובות.”

“אלה המציגים שאלות, הם תמיד המסוכנים ביותר.”

“פילוסוף הוא מי שמגלה כי הוא אינו יודע דבר, וסובל בשל כך.”

“התכונה היחידה הדרושה כדי להיות פילוסוף טוב, היא להשתומם.”

“יום אחד אנו מאבדים את היכולת להדהים את עצמנו, ואין אנו מוצאים אותה שוב אלא בשעת מותנו.”

“אני חושב כי העולם הזה מהווה נס כה דמיוני, עד כי אינני יודע אם לצחוק ואם לבכות.”

“מרגע שאנו יודעים שאין אנו מבינים משהו, אנו נמצאים על הדרך הנכונה כדי להבינו.”

“A philosopher knows that in reality he knows very little. That is why he constantly strives to achieve true insight. Socrates was one of these rare people. He knew that he knew nothing about life and about the world. And now comes the important part: it troubled him that he knew so little.”

“Thus the 'fortune-teller' is trying to foresee something that is really quite unforeseeable. This is characteristic of all forms of foreseeing. And precisely because what they 'see' is so vague, it is hard to repudiate fortune-tellers' claims.”

“So now you must choose... Are you a child who has not yet become world-weary? Or are you a philosopher who will vow never to become so? To children, the world and everything in it is new, something that gives rise to astonishment. It is not like that for adults. Most adults accept the world as a matter of course. This is precisely where philosophers are a notable exception. A philosopher never gets quite used to the world. To him or her, the world continues to seem a bit unreasonable - bewildering, even enigmatic. Philosophers and small children thus have an important faculty in common. The only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder…”

“She was a stranger. She came from a more beautiful fairytale than ours. But she’d managed to find her way into our reality, perhaps because she was here to save us from what people sometimes call ‘the monotony of life.’ Until that moment I’d been completely ignorant of such missionary work. I’d thoughts there was only two types people at least. There was the Orange Girl, and there were the rest of us.”

“I wrote 'Sophie's World' in three months, but I was only writing and sleeping. I work for 14 hours a day when I'm working on a book.”

“Man is the measure of all things', said the Sophist Protagora (c. 485-410 B.C.). By that he meant that the question of whether a thing is right or wrong, good or bad, must always be considered in relation to a person's needs.”

“The universe is a great mystery.”

“When we sense something, it is due to the movement of atoms in space. When I see the moon it is because "moon atoms" penetrate my eye.”