Danish author quotes Quotes

“The task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted.”

“It is more blessed to give than to receive, but then it is also more blessed to be able to do without than to have to have.”

“It is the power of thought that gives man power over nature.”

“Never cease loving a person, and never give up hope for him, for even the prodigal son who had fallen most low, could still be saved; the bitterest enemy and also he who was your friend could again be your friend; love that has grown cold can kindle.”

“It is intelligent to ask two questions: (1) Is it possible? (2) Can I do it?. But it is unintelligent to ask these questions: (1) Is it real? (2) Has my neighbor done it?”

“What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?”

“Then he rustled his feathers, curved his slender neck, and cried joyfully, from the depths of his heart, 'I never dreamed of such happiness as this, while I was an ugly duckling.”

“Job endured everything - until his friends came to comfort him, then he grew impatient.”

“It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand.”

“Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion - and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion ... while Truth again reverts to a new minority.”

“Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.”

“There are two kinds of geniuses. The characteristic of the one is roaring, but the lightning is meagre and rarely strikes; the other kind is characterized by reflection by which it constrains itself or restrains the roaring. But the lightning is all the more intense; with the speed and sureness of lightning it hits the selected particular points - and is fatal.”

“It seems essential, in relationships and all tasks, that we concentrate only on what is most significant and important.”

“No one is so terribly deceived as he who does not himself suspect it.”

“I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations - one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it - you will regret both.”

“The minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion.”

“No grand inquisitor has in readiness such terrible tortures as has anxiety and no spy knows how to attack more artfully the man he suspects, choosing the instant when he is weakest; nor knows how to lay traps where he will be caught and ensnared as anxiety knows how, and no sharp-witted judge knows how to interrogate, to examine the accused, as anxiety does, which never lets him escape.”

“If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?”

“My life is absolutely meaningless. When I consider the different periods into which it falls, it seems like the word Schnur in the dictionary, which means in the first place a string, in the second, a daughter-in-law. The only thing lacking is that the word Schnur should mean in the third place a camel, in the fourth, a dust-brush.”

“Happy domestic life is like a beautiful summer's evening; the heart is filled with peace; and everything around derives a peculiar glory.”

“I would have perished had I not perished.”

“Life is like a beautiful melody, only the lyrics are messed up.”

“During the first period of our lives the greatest danger is not to take the risk. When once the risk has been taken, then the greatest danger is to risk too much. By not risking at first one turns aside and serves trivialities; in the second case, by risking too much, one turns aside to the fantastic and perhaps to presumption.”

“It requires courage not to surrender oneself to the ingenious or compassionate counsels of despair that would induce a man to eliminate himself from the ranks of the living; but it does not follow from this that every huckster who is fattened and nourished in self-confidence has more courage than the man who yielded to despair.”

“Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other clause - that it must be lived forward. The more one thinks through this clause, the more one concludes that life in temporality never becomes properly understandable, simply because never at any time does one get perfect repose to take the stance - backward.”

“Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts.”

“Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, who so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility.”

“Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.”

“How ironical that it is by means of speech that man can degrade himself below the level of dumb creation -- for a chatterbox is truly of a lower category than a dumb creature.”

“For love is exultant when it unites equals, but it is triumphant when it makes that which was unequal equal in love.”

“Only the noble of heart are called to difficulty.”

“Death cannot explain itself. The earnestness consists precisely in this, that the observer must explain it to himself.”

“Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally and happily secured against despair.”

“Your own tactic is to train yourself in the art of becoming enigmatic to everybody. My young friend, suppose there was no one who troubld himself to guess your riddle--what joy, then, would you have in it?”

“How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.”

“And the Top spoke no more of his old love; for that dies away when the beloved objects has lain for five years in a roof gutter and got wet through; yes, one does not know her again when one meets her in the dust box.”

“Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift; in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself an inmate.”

“The unhappy person is never present to themself because they always live in the past or the future.”

“Men think that it is impossible for a human being to love his enemies, for enemies are hardly able to endure the sight of one another. Well, then, shut your eyes--and your enemy looks just like your neighbor.”

“In my great melancholy, I loved life, for I love my melancholy.”

“Brave soldier, never fear. Even though your death is near.”

“Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do”

“In the days of Moses and the prophets such a man would have been counted among the wise men of the land; in the Middle Ages he would have been burned at the stake.”

“Knowledge is an attitude, a passion, actually an illicit attitude. For the compulsion to know is like dipsomania, erotomania, and homicidal mania, in producing a character that is out of balance. It is not at all that the scientist goes after the truth.”

“The naive was only a part of my fairy tales; humour was the real salt in them.”

“Truth is not introduced into the individual from without, but was within him all the time.”

“I covet honour in the same way as a miser covets gold.”

“Not just in commerce but in the world of ideas too our age is putting on a veritable clearance sale. Everything can be had so dirt cheap that one begins to wonder whether in the end anyone will want to make a bid.”

“It occurs to me that artists go forward by going backward, something which I have nothing against intrinsically when it is a reproduced retreat - as is the case with the better artists.”

“Choose to be who you are. . . The individual who would become a person must at some point take over his entire being - must, that is, choose herself.”