Jostein Gaarder Quotes

Vision, I say, is related to light itself. But of this sensation and the things pertaining to it, I pretend to understand but little; and since even a long time would not suffice to explain that trifle, or even to hint at an explanation, I pass over this in silence.

In our daily lives we attend primarily to that which the senses are spelling out for us: to what the eyes perceive, to what the fingers touch. Reality to us is thinghood , consisting of substances that occupy space; even God is conceived by most of us as a thing. The result of our thinginess is our blindness to all reality that fails to identify itself as a thing, as a matter of fact.

Our ability to perceive the world around us seems so effortless that we tend to take it for granted.

Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.

Common sense says that chairs and tables exist independently of whether anyone happens to perceive them or not.

The question of the composition of perceptible objects is one which already occupied the mind of the ancient Greeks.

Our reason arises, at the very least, from this twofold lesson of sensuous revelations and human testimonies.

You must consider, when reading this treatise, that mental perception, because connected with matter, is subject to conditions similar to those to which physical perception is subject.

What a thing is and what it means are not separate, the former being physical and the latter mental as we are accustomed to believe.

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

I like to use light as a material, but my medium is actually perception. I want you to sense yourself sensing - to see yourself seeing.

Things seen are mightier than things heard.

How do we see physically? No differently that we do in our consciousness - by means of the productive power of imagination. Consciousness is the eye and ear, the sense for inner and outer meaning.

Colour is the touch of the eye, Music to the deaf, A word out of darkness.

The only sense we still respect is eyesight, probably because it is so closely attached to the brain. Go into any American house at random, you will find something - a plastic flower, false tiles, some imitation something - something which can be appreciated as material only if apprehended by eyesight alone. Don't we go sightseeing in cars, thinking we can experience a landscape by looking at it through glass?

Rejecting all organs of informationbut my senses, I rid myself of the Pyrrhonisms with which an indulgence in speculations hyperphysical and antiphysical so uselessly occupy and disquiet the mind.

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

But surely, speaking carefully, we do not sense 'red' and 'blue' any more than 'resemblance' (or 'qualities' any more than 'relations'): we sense something of which we might say, if we wished to talk about it, that 'this is red.'

The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.

The eye, the window of the soul, is the chief means whereby the understanding can most fully and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of Nature; and the ear is second.

You heard me. You ain't blind.

I open my eyes and my ears, and that’s why I work.

Things which we see are not by themselves what we see ... It remains completely unknown to us what the objects may be by themselves and apart from the receptivity of our senses. We know nothing but our manner of perceiving them.

By nature, I am a materialist... It is exactly these impingements upon our sense of touch and so forth that I'm interested in.

The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind.