Sophie's World, Jostein Gaarder
"She would not be living on this planet for more than a few years. But if the history of mankind was her own history, in a way she was thousands of years old."
"I don't know, Sophie thought. Surely nobody really knows. And yet--Sophie thought it was a fair question. For the first time in her life she felt it wasn't right to live in the world without at least inquiring where it came from." p. 7
"Anaxagoras is also interesting because he was the first philosopher we hear of Athens. He was from Asia Minor but he moved to Athens at the age of forty. He was later accused of atheism and was ultimately forced to leave the city. Among other things, he said that the sun was not a god but a red-hot stone, bigger than the entire Peloponnesian peninsula." p. 34
"Aristotle then emphasized that all three criteria must be present at the same time for man to find happiness and fulfilment. He rejected all forms of imbalance. Had he lived today he might have said that a person who only develops his body lives a life that is just as unbalanced as someone who only uses his head. Both extremes are an expression of a warped way of life." p. 97
"Throughout the entire history of philosophy, philosophers have sought to discover what man is--or what human nature is. But Sartre believed that man has no such eternal "nature" to fall back on. It is therefore useless to search for the meaning of life in general. We are condemned to improvise. We are like actors dragged onto the stage without having learned our lines, with no script and no prompter to whisper stage directions to us. We must decide for ourselves how to live." p. 379