Quotes by Danish Authors - Page 4

If this had not been the case with Abraham, then perhaps he might have loved God but notbelieved; for he who loves God without faith reflects upon himself, he who loves God believingly reflects upon God.
Søren Kierkegaard
Many of us pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that we hurry past it.
Søren Kierkegaard
The true aristocracy and the true proletariat of the world are both in understanding with tragedy. To them it is the fundamental principle of God, and the key,—the minor key,—to existence. They differ in this way from the bourgeoisie of all classes, who deny tragedy, who will not tolerate it, and to whom the word of tragedy means in itself unpleasantness.
Isak Dinesen
No! The mission was to terminate one Hipo officer. Not four by random. You didn’t get him so the operation was a failure.”Johannes aka ‘BB’The Informer by Steen Langstrup
Steen Langstrup
Policy-makers continue to discover that they cannot solve today’s problems with yesterday’s mindsets
Widad Akreyi
Now I remembered a captain's honor and his only duty: to bring his crew back alive.
Carsten Jensen
No, like worldly contempt, worldly honor is a whirlpool, a play of confused forces, an illusory moment in the flux of opinions. It is a sense-deception, as when a swarm of insects at a distance seem to the eye like one body; a sense-deception, as when the noise of the many at a distance seems to the ear like a single voice.
Søren Kierkegaard
As long as our voiced were in harmony, it didn't matter that our accents were at war.
Carsten Jensen
Though I had no respect for Jack Lewis, I respected the hole in his chest. He was dying, and you owe the dying your attention.
Carsten Jensen
Deep within every blind, absolute love grows a hatred toward the beloved, who now holds the only existing key to happiness
Peter Høeg
It is madness. But sometimes, madness is the only path forward.
Anne Fortier
Their eyes persecuted him everywhere, eventually following him all the way into the darkness around his bed and into his dreams, like a madness that threatened to overpower him.
Carsten Jensen
It's all a waste of time. Everything begins only to end. The moment you were born you began to die. That's how it is with everything.
Janne Teller
If something's worth getting upset about, then there must be something worth getting happy about. And if something's worth getting happy about, then there must be something that matters. But there isnt!.. In a few years you'll all be dead and forgotten and diddly-squat, nothing, so you might just as well start getting used to it!
Janne Teller
The reason dying is so easy is because death has no meaning... And the reason death has no meaning is because life has no meaning. All the same, have fun!
Janne Teller
Ignore the real world“That would never work in the real world.” You hear it all the time when you tell people about a fresh idea.This real world sounds like an awfully depressing place to live. It’s a place where new ideas, unfamiliar approaches, and foreign concepts alwayslose. The only things that win are what people already know and do, even if those things are flawed and inefficient.Scratch the surface and you’ll find these “real world” inhabitants are filled with pessimism and despair. They expect fresh concepts to fail. Theyassume society isn’t ready for or capable of change.Even worse, they want to drag others down into their tomb. If you’re hopeful and ambitious, they’ll try to convince you your ideas are impossible.They’ll say you’re wasting your time.
David Heinemeier Hansson
A PSYCHOLOGICAL TIPWhenever you're called on to make up your mind,and you're hampered by not having any,the best way to solve the dilemma, you'll find,is simply by spinning a penny.No -- not so that chance shall decide the affairwhile you're passively standing there moping;but the moment the penny is up in the air,you suddenly know what you're hoping.
Piet Hein
Great love, you believe, carries the seeds of great sorrow. Well, perhaps you are right. Perhaps the wise spurn one to remain safe from the other, but I should rather choose to have my eyes burnt in their sockets than to have been born without.
Anne Fortier
She laughed out loud, a warm, knowing laughter that made me once again wonder about the secret ingredient in these women’s lives. Whatever it was, I was clearly missing it. It was so much more than just self-confidence; it seemed to be the ability to love oneself, enthusiastically and unsparingly, body and soul, naturally followed by the assumption that every man on the planet is dying to get in on the act.
Anne Fortier
I’ve seen you in action, BB. You get turned on by danger. You are seeking danger. The only reason you’re with me is the risk of getting caught by your wife.”Ingrid aka ‘Alis K’The Informer by Steen Langstrup
Steen Langstrup
MankindMen, said the Devil,are good to their brothers:they don’t want to mendtheir own ways, but each other's.
Piet Hein
Juliet by Ann Fortier. The Maestro (Chapter5) ... the slight nausea he was feeling must be somewhat near what God was feeling every minute of every day. If indeed He felt anything. He was, after all, a divine being, and it was entirely conceivable that divinity was incompatible with emotion. If not, then the Maestro sincerely pitied God, for the history of mankind was nothing more than a long tale of tears.
Anne Fortier
... the slight nausea he was feeling must be somewhat neat what God was feeling every minute of every day. If indeed He felt anything. He was, after all, a divine being, and it was entirely conceivable that divinity was incompatible with emotion. If not, then the Maestro sincerely pitied God, for hte history of mankind was nothing more than a long tale of tears. (From "Juliet" thought by The Maestro. Chapter 5)
Ann Fortier
Then little Gerda said the Lord's Prayer; the cold was so intense that she could see her own breath; it came out of her mouth like smoke. Her breath became thicker and thicker, and took the form of little angels who grew larger and larger as soon as they touched the ground. All had helmets on their heads, and lances and shields in their hands; their numbers increased, and when Gerda had finished her prayer a whole legion stood around her. They trust their lances against the horrible snow-flakes, so that the latter flew into a hundred pieces; and little Gerda went forward safely and cheerfully. The angels stroked her hands and feet, so that she felt the cold less, and she hastened on to the Snow Queen's castle.
Hans Christian Andersen
We all try to camouflage the monotony, But it takes a lot of energy. To insist on being special all the time. When we're so much like one another anyway. Our triumphs are the same. Our pain. Try for a moment to feel what relief there is in the ordinary.
Peter Høeg
As the ironist does not have the new within his power, it might be asked how he destroys the old, and to this it must be answered: he destroys the given actuality by the given actuality itself.
Søren Kierkegaard
The Dark Ages gradually ended six centuries ago with the Renaissance, which seeded new ideas for a different world. The Renaissance ideal dominated our culture until three centuries ago, from the 14th to the 18th century, when it was superseded by modernism. Not surprisingly, this human ideal has almost been forgotten in our culture. The Renaissance, literally "re-birth", was a revival and rediscovery of classical Greek and Roman culture following the decline of culture, trade, and technology during the Dark Ages.
Jacob Lund Fisker
I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.
Søren Kierkegaard
ON PROBLEMSOur choicest planshave fallen through,our airiest castlestumbled over,because of lineswe neatly drewand later neatlystumbled over.
Piet Hein
Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back.
Piet Hein
Real women have children, wise women choose for themselves.
Karin Rahbek
I heard a bump and knew it must have been Nathan throwing the door up in anger. “And so what if she is here you asshole? I told you the other day that you are NOT welcome here anymore..!” He roared.
Line F. Nielsen
Courage has no age.
Anne Fortier
I turn off my cell phone and reluctantly slide it down my pocket. My hands are shaking. A large knife appears in his hand.”William Wilson in the short story 'Metro' by Steen Langstrup
Steen Langstrup
Without discussing it with his mother, Anton went up to his teacher, Miss Katballe, and informed her that after seven years he was now quitting school. It was the best day of her life, she replied. With unexpected politeness he bowed, thanked her, and said, likewise.
Carsten Jensen
For love is exultant when it unites equals, but it is triumphant when it makes that which was unequal equal in love.
Søren Kierkegaard
No, Karl, not now. Take it easy. It’s our happy day.”Poul-Erik’s MotherThe Informer by Steen Langstrup
Steen Langstrup
Yet in another and still more definite sense despair is the sickness unto death. It is indeed very far from being true that, literally understood, one dies of this sickness, or that this sickness ends with bodily death. On the contrary, the torment of despair is precisely this, not to be able to die So it has much in common with the situation of the moribund when he lies and struggles with death, and cannot die. So to be sick unto death is, not to be able to die -- yet not as though there were hope of life; no the hopelessness in this case is that even the last hope, death, is not available. When death is the greatest danger, one hopes for life; but when one becomes acquainted with an even more dreadful danger, one hopes for death. So when the danger is so great that death has become one’s hope, despair is the disconsolateness of not being able to die.
Søren Kierkegaard
...The discrepancy is that the ethical self should be found immanently in the despair, that the individual won himself by persisting in the despair. True, he has used something within the category of freedom, choosing himself, which seem to remove the difficulty, one that presumably has not struck many, since philosophically doubting everything and then finding the true beginning goes one, two, three. But that does not help. In despairing, I use myself to despair, and therefore I can indeed despair of everything by myself. But if I do this, I cannot come back by myself. It is in this moment of decision that the individual needs divine assistance, whereas it is quite correct that in order to be at this point one must first have understood the existence-relation between the aesthetic and the ethical; that is to say, by being there in passion and inwardness, one surely becomes aware of the religious - and of the leap.
Søren Kierkegaard
Hence it is a superficial view (which presumably has never seen a person in despair, not even one’s own self) when it is said of a man in despair, "He is consuming himself." For precisely this it is he despairs of, and to his torment it is precisely this he cannot do, since by despair fire has entered into something that cannot burn, or cannot burn up, that is, into the self.
Søren Kierkegaard
Just as the weak, despairing person is unwilling to hear anything about any consolation eternity has for him, so a person in such despair does not want to hear anything about it, either, but for a different reason: this very consolation would be his undoing; as a denunciation of all existence. Figuratively speaking, it is as if an error slipped into an author's writing and the error became conscious of itself as an error; perhaps it actually was not a mistake but in a much higher sense an essential part of the whole production, and now this error wants to mutiny against the author, out of hatred toward him, forbidding him to correct it and in maniacal defiance saying to him: No! I refuse to be erased! I will stand as a witness against you; a witness that you are a second-rate author.
Søren Kierkegaard
Whether you are man or woman, rich or poor, dependent or free, happy or unhappy; whether you bore in your elevation the splendour of the crown or in humble obscurity only the toil and heat of the day; whether your name will be remembered for as long as the world lasts, and so will have been remembered as long as it lasted, or you are without a name and run namelessly with the numberless multitude; whether the glory that surrounded you surpassed all human description, or the severest and most ignominious human judgment was passed on you -- eternity asks you and every one of these millions of millions, just one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not, whether so in despair that you did not know that you were in despair, or in such a way that you bore this sickness concealed deep inside you as your gnawing secret, under your heart like the fruit of a sinful love, or in such a way that, a terror to others, you raged in despair. If then, if you have lived in despair, then whatever else you won or lost, for you everything is lost, eternity does not acknowledge you, it never knew you, or, still more dreadful, it knows you as you are known, it manacles you to yourself in despair!
Søren Kierkegaard
... Because one who seeks the highest must not leave any path untried.
Peter Høeg
The profundity of Christianity is that Christ is both our redeemer and our judge, not that one is our redeemer and another is our judge, for then we certainly come under judgement, but that the redeemer and the judge are the same.
Søren Kierkegaard
George III was incapable of passing on a sense of mission to his son might a given some purpose to the crown prince's existence
Henrik Bering
The follower aspires with all his strength to be what he admires. And then, remarkably enough, even though he lives amongst a 'Christian people,' he incurs the same peril as he did when it was dangerous to openly confess Christ. And because of the follower's life, it will become evident who the admirers are, for the admirers will become agitated with him. Even these words will disturb many - but then they must likewise belong to the admirers.
Søren Kierkegaard
No,” he said after a pause, “the true art of the gods is the comic. The comic is a condescension of the divine to the world of man; it is the sublime vision, which cannot be studied, but must ever be celestially granted. In the comic the gods see their own being reflected as in a mirror, and while the tragic poet is bound by strict laws, they will allow the comic artist a freedom as unlimited as their own. They do not even withhold their own existence from his sports. Jove may favor Lucianos of Samosata. As long as your mockery is in true godly taste you may mock at the gods and still remain a sound devotee. But in pitying, or condoling with your god, you deny and annihilate him, and such is the most horrible of atheisms.
Karen Blixen
Hope is a passion for the possible.
Søren Kierkegaard
The powerlessness of people with pure intentions, in the long run, can sometimes be more powerful than power in the hands of those blinded or depraved by evil tempers.
Widad Akreyi
It doesn't matter if you're born in a duck yard, so long as you are hatched from a swan's egg!
Hans Christian Andersen
Great love, you believe, carries the seeds of great sorrow.
Anne Fortier
Being brave meant that though you might be frightened, you would face the greatest danger if you knew it was the right thing to do.
Anne Holm
You can tease it's mane all you like, but you can't turn a house cat into a lion.
Anne Fortier
BRAVETo be brave is to behavebravely when your heart is faint.So you can be really brave only when you really ain't.
Piet Hein
We are now left to choose between danger and regret, neither of which can restore the lives we have lost.
Anne Fortier
No matter how close people get, they never reach each other. Including us now. Even now, there's a place where each of us is alone.
Peter Høeg
Theology sits rouged at the window and courts philosophy's favor, offering to sell her charms to it.
Søren Kierkegaard
I might be tempted to make to Christendom a proposal different from that of the Bible society. Let us collect all the New Testaments we have, let us bring them out to an open square or up to the summit of a mountain, and while we all kneel let one man speak to God thus: 'Take this book back again; we men, such as we now are, are not fit to go in for this sort of thing, it only makes us unhappy,' This is my proposal, that like those inhabitants in Gerasa we beseech Christ to depart from our borders. This would be an honest and human way of talking -- rather different from the disgusting hypocritical priestly fudge...
Søren Kierkegaard
VITA BREVIS A lifetimeis morethansufficiently longfor people to get what there is of itwrong.
Piet Hein
Never let me hear you say it's someone else's fault. It often is, but you must never shirk your own responsibility ... You can't change others, but you can do something about a fault in yourself.
Anne Holm