Quotes by Danish Authors - Page 10

@She is really really so beautiful there,' said Assad.Carl glanced at him. Apparently a woman's appearance was a particularly valuable factor in his assistant's world-view. But Carl agreed with him.
Jussi Adler-Olsen
She was a bitch,' Carl suddenly heard somebody say in the background, and that apparently refreshed everyone's memory.yes, thought Carl with satisfaction. It's the good stable arseholes like us who are remembered best.
Jussi Adler-Olsen
Assad: 'I have written it just down here.'He Pointed to a number of Arabic symbols that could just as well have meant it was going to snow in the Lofoten Islands in the morning.
Jussi Adler-Olsen
Carl Mørck, am I disturbing you? said a voice at the door, which made his blood boil and turn to ice at the same time. His spinal cord sent five commands through his infrastructure: get rid of the eraser, cover the last line, put away the cigarette, drop the stupid facial expression, close your mouth!
Jussi Adler-Olsen
If you want to know what the camel stole from your kitchen yesterday, then you shouldn;t slit open its stomach. You should stare into its arsehole.
Jussi Adler-Olsen
He'd make her work so hard that a job as a cardboard-box presser at the margerine factory would seem like paradise.
Jussi Adler-Olsen
Bak stood a moment, as though considering whether the sum total of their shared working life was ending in a minus or a plus.
Jussi Adler-Olsen
Assad whistled a few notes of one of his native country's melancholic songs. It sounded as though he was whistling backwards
Jussi Adler-Olsen
But he is an Italian," was Umberto's sensible reply. "He doesn't care if you break some law a little bit, as long as you wear beautiful shoes. Are you wearing beautiful shoes? Are you wearing the shoes I gave you?...principessa?"I looked down at my flip-flops. "I guess I'm toast.
Anne Fortier
Humor is something that thrives between man's aspirations and his limitations. There is more logic in humor than in anything else. Because, you see, humor is truth.
Victor Borge
(Responding to a sneeze from the audience) Who exploded?
Victor Borge
(Referring to the piano's natural shape) Isn't it a shame when those big fat opera singers lean against the pianos and bend them?
Victor Borge
I normally don't do requests. Unless, of course, I have been asked to do so.
Victor Borge
One afternoon, when I was four years old, my father came home, and he found me in the living room in front of a roaring fire, which made him very angry. Because we didn't have a fireplace.
Victor Borge
Put up in a placewhere it is easy to seethe cryptic admonishmentT.T.TWhen you feel how depressinglyslowly you climbit's well to remember thatThings Take Time.
Piet Hein
Life consists of many different stories. A person has not just one but countless life stories that weave in between each other and together create exactly that specific life and that specific human being.
Iben Dissing Sandahl
Under certain circumstances the fateful decisions in life, sometimes even in matters of life and death, are made with an almost indifferent ease. While the little things-for instance, the way people hang on to what is over-seem so important.
Peter Høeg
If someone who wanted to learn to dance were to say: For centuries, one generation after the other has learned the positions, and it is high time that I take advantage of this and promptly begin with the quadrille--people would presumably laugh a little at him, but in the world of spirit this is very plausible. What, then, is education? I believed it is the course the individual goes through in order to catch up with himself, and the person who will not go through this course is not much helped by being born in the most enlightened age.
Søren Kierkegaard
Everybody is always touting the division between religion and science.... That division is based on a false premise. It simply doesn't exist. The first sciences developed from a desire to prove the existence of God. In that sense, science and religion have been hand in hand from the very beginning.
A.J. Kazinski
The more he needs God, the more deeply he comprehends he is in need of God, and then the more he in his need presses forward to God, the more perfect he is... To need God is nothing to be ashamed of but is perfection itself.
Søren Kierkegaard
If a believer demands that I, as a nonbeliever, observe his taboos in the public domain, he is not asking for my respect, but for my submission.
Flemming Rose
I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.
Karen Blixen
It takes a purely human courage to renounce the whole temporal realm in order to gain eternity, but this I do gain and in all eternity can never renounce—it is a self-contradiction. But it takes a paradoxical and humble courage to grasp the whole temporal realm now by virtue of the absurd, and this is the courage of faith.
Søren Kierkegaard
You are a hater of activity in life; quite right, for before there can be any meaning in activity, life must have continuity, and this your life lacks. You occupy yourself with your studies, that is true, you are even industrious. But it is only for your own sake and is done with as little teleology as possible. Otherwise you are unoccupied; like those workers in the Gospel, you stand idle in the marketplace (Matthew 20:3). You stick your hands in your pockets and observe life. Then you rest in despair, nothing occupies you, you don’t step aside for anything: “if someone were to throw a tile down from the roof I wouldn’t get out of the way.” You are like someone dying, you die daily, not in the profound, serious sense in which one usually takes that word, but life has lost its reality and “you always reckon your lifetime from one day’s notice to quit to the next”. You let everything pass you by, it makes no impression, but then suddenly something comes which grips you, an idea, a situation, a smile from a young girl, and then you are “in touch”; for just as on some occasions you are not in touch, so at others you are in touch and of service in every way. Wherever something is going on you are “in touch”. You conduct your life as it is your custom to behave in a crowd, you “work your way into the thickest of it, trying if possible to be forced up above the others so as to be able to lie on top of them”; if you manage to get up there you “make yourself as comfortable as possible”, and this is also the way you let yourself be carried along through life. But when the crowd disperses, when the event is over, you stand once more at the street corner and look at the world. A dying person possesses, as you know, a supernatural energy, and so too with you. If there is an idea to be thought through, a work to be read through, a plan to be carried out, a little adventure to be experienced - yes, a hat to be bought, you take hold of the matter with an immense energy. According to circumstance, you work on untiringly for a day, for a month; you are happy in the assurance that you still have the same abundance of strength as before, you take no rest, “no Satan can keep up with you”. If you work together with others, you work them into the ground. But then when the month or, what you always consider the maximum, the six months have gone, you break off and say, “and that’s the end of the story”. You retire and leave it all to the other party, or if you have been working alone you talk to no one about what you were doing. You then pretend to yourself and others that you have lost the desire and flatter yourself with the vain thought that you could have kept working with the same intensity if that is what you desired. But that is an immense deception. You would have succeeded in finishing it, as most others, if you had patiently willed it so, but you would have found out at the same time that it needs a kind of perseverance quite different from yours.
Søren Kierkegaard
Faith is a marvel, and yet no human being is excluded from it; for that in which all human life is united is passion, and faith is a passion.
Søren Kierkegaard
Sitting calmly on a ship in fair weather is not a metaphor for having faith; but when the ship has sprung a leak, then enthusiastically to keep the ship afloat by pumping and not to seek the harbor--that is the metaphor for having faith. (Concluding Unscientific Postscript)
Søren Kierkegaard
to have faith is precisely to lose one's mind so as to win God.
Søren Kierkegaard
Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in everygeneration may not come that far, but none comes further.
Søren Kierkegaard
What looks like politics, and imagines itself to be political, will one day unmask itself as a religious movement.
Søren Kierkegaard
Min ene sko knirker af mangel på stjerneskud
Benny Andersen
Lovers meander in prose and rhyme,trying to say-for the thousandth time-what's easier done than said.
Piet Hein
A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret suffrings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music. People corwd around the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul.
Søren Kierkegaard
He was weary of himself, of cold ideas and brain dreams. Life a poem? Not when you went about forever poetizing about your own life instead of living it. How innocuous it all was, and empty, empty, empty! This chasing after yourself, craftily observing your own tracks--in a circle, of course.This sham diving into the stream of life while all the time you sat angling after yourself, fishing yourself up in one curious disguise or another! If he could only be overwhelmed by something--life, love, passion--so that he could no longer shape it into poems, but had to let it shape him!
Jens Peter Jacobsen
Maybe it's wrong when we remember breakthroughs to our own being as something that occurs in discrete, extraordinary moments. Maybe falling in love, the piercing knowledge that we ourselves will someday die, and the love of snow are in reality not some sudden events; maybe they were always present. Maybe they never completely vanish, either.
Peter Høeg
I'm going to die. And as if that weren't bad enough, I'm going to die inside a cake.
Peter H. Fogtdal
Once you are born in this world you’re old enough to die.
Søren Kierkegaard
And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.
Søren Kierkegaard
Death walks faster than the wind and never returns what he has taken.
Hans Christian Andersen
There is a trick to flying. The angels told me." He had smiled at my wide-eyed awe. "You need to forget everything you know as a human being. When you are human, you discover that there is great power in hating the earth. And it can almost make you fly. But it never will."I had frowned, not quite understanding him. "So, what's the trick?""Love the sky.
Anne Fortier
People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness.
Søren Kierkegaard
I believe adopting free unstructured play, within an appropriate framework, has rich potential in bringing up happy, well-balanced and resilient children.
Iben Dissing Sandahl
If a city is designed in a way that makes a long drive to work necessary, we harm the social health of that city. If a lot of people cycle, it's probably an indication that you live in a healthy neighborhood. This is something that should be seriously considered in urban planning, if you want to ensure a neighborhood togetherness and trust among locals.
Meik Wiking
Adults are not supposed to play. We are supposed to stress, have worries and be too busy dealing with life's problems. But according to a study undertaken by Princeton University and led by Alan Krueger, Professor in Economics and Public Affairs there, we are happiest when we are involved in engaging leisure activities.
Meik Wiking
But one of the main reasons why Denmark does so well in international happiness surveys is the welfare state, as it reduces uncertainty, worries and stress in the population. You can say that Denmark is the happiest country in the world or you can say that Denmark is the least unhappy country in the world. The welfare state is really good (not perfect, but good) at reducing extreme unhappiness. Universal and free health care, free university education and relatively generous unemployment benefits go a long way towards reducing unhappiness.
Meik Wiking
Happiness is the change that comes over mewhen I describe the worldIt comes over the worldHappiness is the change that comes over mewhen I'm afraidIt comes over the worldFor instance I can be afraid of and for the worldafraid because the world consists among other thingsof me so swiftly dying
Inger Christensen
When my mother didn't come back I realized that any moment could be the last. Nothing in life should simply be a passage from one place to another. Each walk should be taken as if it is the only thing you have left. You can demand something like this of yourself as an unattainable ideal. After that, you have to remind yourself about it every time you're sloppy about something. For me that means 250 times a day.
Peter Høeg
For a moment David was tempted to think that perhaps there were no good people at all outside concentration camps, but then he reminded himself of the sailor and Angelo and the English people who might have been ignorant but were certainly not bad.
Anne Holm
Johannes had once said that violence and cruelty were just a stupid person's way of making himself felt, because it was easer to use your hands to strike a blow than to use your brain to find a logical and just solution to the problem.
Anne Holm
There's always something when you're at fault, too, and that fault you must discover and learn to recognize and take the consequences of it.
Anne Holm
But Johannes had said, "Politeness is something you owe other people, because when you show a little courtesy, everything becomes easier and better. But first and foremost, it's something you owe yourself. You are David.
Anne Holm
I wrote "David" because it seemed to me that children, who can love a book more passionately than any grown person, got such a lot of harmless entertainment and not enough real, valuable literature.
Anne Holm
A WORD TO THE WISELet the world pass in its time-ridden race; never get caught in its snare.Remember, the only acceptable casefor being in any particular place is having no business there.
Piet Hein
A visitor is a friend, he brings news, good or bad, which is bread to the hungry minds in lonely places. A real friend who comes to the house is a heavenly messenger, who brings the panis angelorum.
Karen Blixen
Don't forget to love yourself.
Søren Kierkegaard
Yes, he had made a good choice after all when he had chosen the God of the green pasture and the still waters! He was very powerful, and the fact that He expected you to think for yourself and do something in return for His help did not matter, as long as you could work things out.
Anne Holm
In relationship to God one can not involve himself to a certain degree. God is precisely the contradiction to all that is 'to a certain degree'.
Søren Kierkegaard
People try to persuade us that the objections against Christianity spring from doubt. That is a complete misunderstanding. The objections against Christianity spring from insubordination, the dislike of obedience, rebellion against all authority. As a result, people have hitherto been beating the air in their struggle against objections, because they have fought intellectually with doubt instead of fighting morally with rebellion.
Søren Kierkegaard
Dr Sass…maintained that in paradise, until the time of the fall, the whole world was flat, the back-curtain of the Lord, and that it was the devil who invented a third dimension. Thus are the words ‘straight’, ‘square’, and ‘flat’ the words of noblemen, but the apple was an orb, and the sin of our first parents, the attempt at getting around God. I myself much prefer the art of painting to sculpture
Karen Blixen
Almighty God, thee only have I; thou steerest my fate, I must give myself up to thee! Give me a livelihood! Give me a bride! My blood wants love, as my heart does!
Hans Christian Andersen
For he who loves God without faith reflects on himself, while the person who loves God in faith reflects on God.
Søren Kierkegaard