People are, generally speaking, either dead certain or totally indifferent (Both types are crawling around deep down in the rabbit's fur!)

— 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

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.

— Jostein Gaarder

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.

— Jostein Gaarder

She was a stranger. She came from a more beautiful fairy tale 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.

— Jostein Gaarder

Since the Renaissance, people have had to get used to living their life on a random planet in the vast galaxy.

— Jostein Gaarder

Socrates himself said, 'One thing only I know, and this is that I know nothing.' Remember this statement, because it is an admission that is rare, even among philosophers. Moreover, it can be so dangerous to say in public that it can cost you your life. The most subversive people are those who ask questions. Giving answers is not nearly as threatening. Any one question can be more explosive than a thousand answers.

— Jostein Gaarder

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…

— Jostein Gaarder

The faculty of vision can vary from person to person. On the other hand, we can rely on what our reason tells us because that is the same for everyone

— Jostein Gaarder

The of sitting a telescope in space was obviously not to get closer to the stars and planets the telescope was to study. That would have been about as daft as standing on tip-toe to get a better picture of the craters on the moon. The whole idea of a space telescope is to study space from a point outside the earth' atmosphere that gives that impression, in roughly the same way the ripping surface of a lake can give the impression that the stones beneath are wavy and indistinct. Or the reverse: from the bottom of a swimming pool it's not easy to see what's happening above the surface.

— Jostein Gaarder