Jostein Gaarder was born in Oslo, Norway in 1952. His parents' occupations presaged his own interests in teaching and writing -- his father was a headmaster and his mother a teacher and author of children's books. Gaarder attended the Oslo Katerdralskole and the University of Oslo, where he studied Scandinavian languages and theology. Following his 1974 marriage, Gaarder began to write, contributing to several textbooks on philosophy and theology. His family moved to Bergen in 1981, where he began to teach high school philosophy, a post he held for several years. His first fiction book, Diagnosen og andre noveller followed in 1991 and was a gigantic success. For three years running it was Norway's number one best-seller, and it repeated this success in nearly every country in which it appeared. To date, the book has been published in 44 languages and was the best-selling fiction book in the world in 1995, an astonishing achievement for what is essentially a textbook in the form of a novel. The success of Sophie's World allowed Gaarder to become a full-time writer. He continues to publish a new book every one to two years. Gaarder, his wife Siri, and their two sons live in Oslo.
Have been a famous author in Norway and Europe since the 1990s.
His book "Sofies verden" (Sophies World) was the number one bestselling fiction-book in the world in 1995. Nine years later the book has sold roughly 26 million copies.
How terribly sad it was that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as extraordinary as living.
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…,Imagine that one day you are out for a walk in the woods. Suddenly you see a small spaceship on the path in front of you. A tiny Martian climbs out the spaceship and stands on the ground looking up at you…What would you think? Never mind, it’s not important. But have you ever given any thought to the fact that you are a Martian yourself?It is obviously unlikely that you will ever stumble upon a creature from another planet. We do not even know that there is life on other planets. But you might stumble upon yourself one day. You might suddenly stop short and see yourself in a completely new light. On just such a walk in the woods. I am an extraordinary being, you think. I am a mysterious creature. You feel as if you are waking from an enchanted slumber. Who am I? you ask. You know that you are stumbling around on a planet in the universe. But what is the universe?If you discover yourself in this manner you will have discovered something as mysterious as the Martian we just mentioned. You will not only have seen a being from outer space. You will feel deep down that you are yourself an extraordinary being.
Wisest is she who knows she does not know.
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.
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.
Imagine that you were on the threshold of this fairytale, sometime billions of years ago when everything was created. And you were able to choose whether you wanted to be born to a life on this planet at some point. You wouldn’t know when you were going to be born, nor how long you’d live for, but at any event it wouldn’t be more than a few years. All you’d know was that, if you chose to come into the world at some point, you’d also have to leave it again one day and go away from everything. This might cause you a good deal of grief, as lots of people think that life in the great fairytale is so wonderful that the mere thought of it ending can bring tears to their eyes. Things can be so nice here that it’s terribly painful to think that at some point the days will run out. What would you have chosen, if there had been some higher power that had gave you the choice? Perhaps we can imagine some sort of cosmic fairy in this great, strange fairytale. What you have chosen to live a life on earth at some point, whether short or long, in a hundred thousand or a hundred million years? Or would you have refused to join in the game because you didn’t like the rules? (. . . ) I asked myself the same question maybe times during the past few weeks. Would I have elected to live a life on earth in the firm knowledge that I’d suddenly be torn away from it, and perhaps in the middle of intoxicating happiness? (. . . ) Well, I wasn’t sure what I would have chosen. (. . . ) 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.
If just one of [those people] experiences life as a crazy adventure--and I mean that he, or she, experiences this every single day. . . Then he or she is a joker in a pack of cards.
A lot of people experience the world with the same incredulity as when a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat. …We know that the world is not all sleight of hand and deception because we are in it, we are part of it. Actually we are the white rabbit being pulled out of the hat. The only difference beween us and the white rabbit is that the rabbit does not realize it is taking part in a magic trick.
A true philosopher must never give up.
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.
Wir werden alt und grau. Wir werden eines Tages verschlissen sein und aus der Welt verschwinden. Mit unseren Träumen ist das anders. Sie können in anderen Menschen weiterleben, wenn es uns schon längst, längst nicht mehr gibt.
But what is a person, George? How much is a person worth? Are we nothing but dust that is whipped up and spread to the winds?,We are the universe.
Perhaps we aren’t fully developed. The physical development of human beings necessarily had to precede the psychological. Perhaps the physical nature of the universe is merely a necessary external material for its own self-awareness.
I can wait until my heart bleeds with sorrow.
She sent me a sunny smile, and what a smile, George; it was a smile that could have melted the whole world, because if the whole world had seen it, it would have had the power to stop all wars and hatred on the face of the planet, or at lease there would have been some long ceasefires.
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.
Life is both sad and solemn. We are led into a wonderful world, we meet one another here, greet each other - and wander together for a brief moment. Then we lose each other and disappear as suddenly and unreasonably as we arrived.
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.
A state that does not educate and train women is like a man who only trains his right arm.
The rearing of children is considered too important to be left to the individual and should be the responsibility of the state.
But if the history of mankind was her own history, in a way she was thousands of years old.
A composition—and every work of art is one—is created in a wondrous interplay between imagination and reason, or between mind and reflection. For there will always be an element of chance in the creative process.
Over the entrance to the temple at Delphi was a famous inscription: KNOW THYSELF! It reminded visitors that man must never believe himself to be more than mortal - and that no man can escape his destiny.
But the dream of something unlikely has its own special name. We call it hope.
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.
. . . 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. . .
All a man can see while looking at the sky are cosmic fossils of thousands and millions of years ago. The only thing an astrologer can predict, is the past.
It takes billions of years to create a human being. And it takes only a few seconds to die.
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.
Since the Renaissance, people have had to get used to living their life on a random planet in the vast galaxy.
Even though God could create all kinds of things, he could hardly create himself before he had a "self" to create with. So there was only one possibility left: God had always existed. But she had already rejected that possibility! Everything that existed had to have a beginning.
Acting responsibly is not a matter of strengthening our reason but of deepening our feelings for the welfare of others.
The story goes that one day Socrates stood gazing at a stall that sold allkinds of wares. Finally he said, “What a lot of things I don’t need!,People are, generally speaking, either dead certain or totally indifferent.
