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When you realize there is something you don't understand, then you're generally on the right path to understanding all kinds of things.
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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.
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Life is like a huge lottery in which only the winning tickets are visible.
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The Idea is much too big for my little head.
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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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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.
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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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Moreover, nature's blocks had to be eternal-because nothing can come from nothing.
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Everything we see in the sky is a cosmic fossil from thousands and millions of years ago.
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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.
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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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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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Maybe we can comprehend a flower or an insect, but we can never comprehend ourselves. Even less can we expect to comprehend the universe.
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The rearing of children is considered too important to be left to the individual and should be the responsibility of the state.
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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.
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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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Since the Renaissance, people have had to get used to living their life on a random planet in the vast galaxy.
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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.
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We can be hindered in our development and our personal growth by political conditions. Outer circumstances can constrain us. Only when we are free to develop our innate abilities can we live as free beings. But we are just as much determined by inner potential and outer opportunities as the Stone Age boy on the Rhine, the lion in Africa, or the apple tree in the garden.
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How terribly sad it was that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as extraordinary as living.
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But she'd managed to find her way into our reality, perhaps because she had an important mission here, perhaps because she was here to save us from what people call the monotony of life.
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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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Hegel said that truth is subjective, thus rejecting the existence of any truth above or beyond human reason. All knowledge is human knowledge.
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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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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...
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Quote of the day
Joy is like restless day; but peace divine Like quiet night; Lead me, O Lord, — till perfect Day shall shine Through Peace to Light.
Adelaide Anne Procter
Jostein Gaarder
Creative Commons
Born:
August 8, 1952
(age 71)
Bio:
Jostein Gaarder is 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.
Known for:
Sophie's World (1991)
The Solitaire Mystery (1990)
The Christmas Mystery (1992)
Appelsinpiken (2003)
Vita Brevis: A Letter to St Augustine (1996)
Most used words:
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understand
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