Danish author Quotes

“I stick my finger into existence.. it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean?”

“In the life of the individual when love awakens it is older than everything else, because when it exists it seems as if it has existed for a long time; it presupposes itself back into the distant past until all searching ends in the inexplicable origin.”

“Hope is passion for what is possible.”

“Once you are born in this world you’re old enough to die.”

“It goes against the grain for me to do what so often happens, to speak inhumanly about the great as if a few millennia were an immense distance. I prefer to speak humanly about it, as if it happened yesterday, and let only the greatness itself be the distance.”

“Trouble is the common denominator of living. It is the great equalizer.”

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

“No one may pride himself at being more than an individual, and no one despondently think that he is not an individual.”

“Maturity consists in the discovery that there comes a critical moment where everything is reversed, after which the point becomes to understand more and more that there is something which cannot be understood.”

“The thinker without a paradox is like a lover without a feeling: a paltry mediocrity.”

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

“It is (to describe it figuratively) as if an author were to make a slip of the pen, and as if this clerical error became conscious of being such. Perhaps this was no error but in a far higher sense was an essential part of the whole exposition. It is, then, as if this clerical error were to revolt against the author, out of hatred for him, were to forbid him to correct it, and were to say, "No, I will not be erased, I will stand as a witness against thee, that thou art a very poor writer."”

“To be a woman is something so strange, so confusing and so complicated that only a woman could put up with it.”

“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.”

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

“The melancholy have the best sense of the comic, the opulent often the best sense of the rustic, the dissolute often the best sense of the moral, and the doubter often the best sense of the religious.”

“It is tragic-comic to see that all this knowledge and understanding exercises no power at all over men's lives, that their lives do not express in the remotest way what they have understood, but rather the opposite.”

“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.”

“It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox.”

“The highest of all is not to understand the highest but to act upon it.”

“When you say 'Yes' or promise something, you can very easily deceive yourself and others also, as if you had already done what you promised. It is easy to think that by making a promise you have at least done part of what you promised to do, as if the promise itself were something of value. Not at all! In fact, when you do not do what you promise, it is a long way back to the truth.”

“It will be easy for us the first time we receive that ball of yarn from Ariadne (love) and then go through all the mazes of the labyrinth (life) and kill the monster. But how many there are who plunge into life (the labyrinth) without taking that precaution?”

“I do not lack the courage to think a thought whole.”

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

“Repetition is the reality and the seriousness of life.”