Sophie's World

by Jostein Gaarder

As clever, vain and inventive as we are, it is easy to forget that we are simply primates.

You can’t experience being alive without realizing that you have to die, she thought. But it’s just as impossible to realize you have to die without thinking how incredibly amazing it is to be alive.

‘Superstitious.’ What a strange word. If you believed in Christianity or Islam, it was called ‘faith.’ But if you believed in astrology or Friday the thirteenth it was superstition! Who had the right to call other people’s belief superstition?

Similarly, Socrates saw his task as helping people to ‘give birth’ to the correct insight, since real understanding must come from within. It cannot be imparted by someone else.

‘Life is both sad and solemn. We are let 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.’

What is usually known as Hegel’s philosophy is mainly a method for understanding the progress of history. Hegel’s philosophy teaches us nothing about the inner nature of life, but it can teach us to think productively.’

‘In a capitalist society, labor is organized in such a way that the worker in fact slaves for another social class. Thus the worker transfers his own labor – and with it, the whole of his life – to the bourgeoisie.’

‘You could say that life is one big lottery in which only the winning numbers are visible.’

‘Here we are, trying our best to run a business, and to make sure we have insurance coverage against every kind of risk. Then along comes this know-it-all who tries to destroy it all with his “philosophical” allegations.’