Quotes by Danish Authors - Page 9

It is an alarming experience to be, in your person, representing Christianity to the natives.
Isak Dinesen
When one has once fully entered the realm of love, the world — no matter how imperfect — becomes rich and beautiful, it consists solely of opportunities for love.
Søren Kierkegaard
The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly.
Søren Kierkegaard
She had what the Councillor knew, in the technical language of the ballet, as "ballon", a lightness that is not only the negation of weight, but which actually seems to carry upwards and make for flight, and which is rarely found in thin dancers - as if the matter itself had here become lighter than air, so that the more there is of it the better it works.
Karen Blixen
Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.
Camille Pissarro
Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life's relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the window-panes, which vanish with the warmth.
Søren Kierkegaard
The real difference between God and human beings, he thought, was that God cannot stand continuance. No sooner has he created a season of a year, or a time of the day, than he wishes for something quite different, and sweeps it all away. No sooner was one a young man, and happy at that, than the nature of things would rush one into marriage, martyrdom or old age. And human beings cleave to the existing state of things. All their lives they are striving to hold the moment fast....Their art itself is nothing but the attempt to catch by all means the one particular moment, one light, the momentary beauty of one woman or one flower, and make it everlasting.
Karen Blixen
The language we use is extremely powerful. It is the frame through which we perceive and describe ourselves and our picture of the world.
Iben Dissing Sandahl
One can be deeply influenced by people to whom one is utterly hostile
Patricia Crone
Before he had come to the town he had known about nothing but death: here he had learnt to live, to decide things for himself; he had learnt what it felt like to wash in clean water in the sunshine until he was clean himself, and what it felt like to satisfy his hunger with food that tasted good; he had learnt the sound of laughter that was free from cruelty; he had learnt the meaning of beauty
Anne Holm
Now he understood clearly that roads do divide, at the crossroad there is a choice, and blinding oneself to it is a form of choosing, too; it is the fool's way, the coward's way.
Erik Christian Haugaard
Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.
Søren Kierkegaard
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.
Søren Kierkegaard
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
Søren Kierkegaard
People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. They also know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom. It is not the freedom of the dictator, who enforces his own will on the world, but the freedom of the artist, who has no will, who is free of will. The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control. Great landscapes create themselves, long splendid views, rich and delicate colours, roads, houses, which he has never seen or heard of...
Karen Blixen
To Ejinar that cannonball was a monster with a will of its own. It showed him what war was: not a battery that exploded and sent matchstick soldiers fleeing, but a dragon that breathed hot fire on his naked heart.
Carsten Jensen
It is time to recognize the past and ongoing genocides to prevent new ones. Together we can build a better world!
Widad Akreyi
Let’s stand against the killing of innocent civilians. It is time to make the future better than today. Together we can bring peace and unity to our communities.
Widad Akreyi
Those soldiers belonging to the victorious side whose blood has oozed into the ground and whose hearts have ceased beating, have they partaken in the triumph as well as those who are unscarred and busy draining cups of sake to each other's glorious deeds? I rather think they belong instead to the defeated."..."You mean that those who are killed all belong to the defeated, regardless of which side they were on?
Erik Christian Haugaard
Take the sailor," he said. "he signs on to a new ship. He's surrounded by nothing but strangers. Not only do they come from other towns and parts of his own country, but often from completely different nations. He has to learn to work with them. His vocabulary's broadened, he learns new words and grammar, and he comes across new ways of thinking. he turns into a different man, unlike the one who spends his life plowing the same old furrow. These are the men the world needs, not nationalists and warmongers.
Carsten Jensen
I think about something I once heard on the radio. About Abraham and Isaac.""I was afraid you'd say something like that." "You asked.""So what about them? I don't really know much about that kind of stuff.""There was a pastor on the radio who said nobody should ever preach that story. Do you remember how it goes? God tells Abraham that he has to sacrifice his son to prove his faith.""I agree with the pastor. It sounds like a sick story. Ban that shit.""But isn't that exactly what we do? Send young men off to a war in the desert and ask them to sacrifice themselves for a belief?
A.J. Kazinski
That’s war. It won’t let anyone get away unscathed. I’m sorry about Grete.”Verner aka ‘Jens’in the novel 'the Informer' by Steen Langstrup
Steen Langstrup
The quality of life in our world does not depend on the conflicts that arise, but on our response to them.
Widad Akreyi
Death and injury caused by armed violence is one of the most shameful epidemics of our age.
Widad Akreyi
Armed violence and peace cannot coexist. We need to overcome the challenges we face and seek practical solutions. We must replace the culture of war with the culture of peace.
Widad Akreyi
Each day is an opportunity to build the defenses of peace in the minds of people.
Widad Akreyi
Be kind. It's worthwhile to make an effort to learn about other people and figure out what you might have in common with them.
Viggo Mortensen
They were probably scared of him and so they did what boys do around any object of fear: they went up close, pointed a finger, gave it a nickname, and masked their terror with roaring laughter.
Carsten Jensen
They all lived so steeped in fear that the losses they had yet to suffer had already consumed them.
Carsten Jensen
It is when one begins to lose the consciousness of freedom, and when the idea of necessity enters the world at all, when there is any hurry or strain anywhere, a letter to be written or a train to catch, when you have got to work, to make the horses of the dream gallop, or to make the rifles go off, that the dream is declining, and turning into the nightmare, which belongs to the poorest and most vulgar class of dreams.
Karen Blixen
The fear for oneself, that one can do something about. Upon it one can turn the light of awareness. But when one is no longer worrying about oneself, then the fear comes for other people and, after that, for the world.There are no fearless people, only fearless moments.
Peter Høeg
We think there are limits to the dimensions of fear. Until we encounter the unknown. Then we can all feel boundless amounts of terror.
Peter Høeg
Without books, God is silent, justice dormant, natural science at a stand, philosophy lame, letters dumb, and all things involved in darkness.
Thomas Bartholin
Back then I could not understand one word of what I read.Reading did, however, give me heart. Even if you cannot understand what you are reading you can get something from books.
Peter Høeg
Right now there's a commonly-held view among scientists that we know about only four percent of all the matter in the universe. Four percent!""So what about the other 96 percent?""We astrophysicists call it 'dark matter' and 'dark energy.' Maybe we should just call it ignorance. There's so much that we don't know. It's shocking how little we know. And yet we behave like little gods who think we're in control of everything. Like kids with delusions of grandeur. Isn't that what we've made ourselves into? It's as if we're trying to make ourselves believe that four percent is all there is. That everything else, all that we don't know, doesn't exist. But it does. We know it's there; we just don't understand it.
A.J. Kazinski
The very nature of the quantum theory ... forces us to regard the space-time coordination and the claim of causality, the union of which characterizes the classical theories, as complementary but exclusive features of the description, symbolizing the idealization of observation and description, respectively.
Niels Bohr
Stop telling God what to do with his dice.
Niels Bohr
Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.
Niels Bohr
An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.
Niels Bohr
Was she pregnant then?' asked Assad. Judging by the number of family members in his photos, it was a feminine condition with which he was quite familiar.
Jussi Adler-Olsen
@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
Right now there's a commonly-held view among scientists that we know about only four percent of all the matter in the universe. Four percent!""So what about the other 96 percent?""We astrophysicists call it 'dark matter' and 'dark energy.' Maybe we should just call it ignorance. There's so much that we don't know. It's shocking how little we know. And yet we behave like little gods who think we're in control of everything. Like kids with delusions of grandeur. Isn't that what we've made ourselves into? It's as if we're trying to make ourselves believe that four percent is all there is. That everything else, all that we don't know, doesn't exist. But it does. We know it's there; we just don't understand it.
A.J. Kazinski
The very nature of the quantum theory ... forces us to regard the space-time coordination and the claim of causality, the union of which characterizes the classical theories, as complementary but exclusive features of the description, symbolizing the idealization of observation and description, respectively.
Niels Bohr
Stop telling God what to do with his dice.
Niels Bohr
Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.
Niels Bohr
An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.
Niels Bohr
Was she pregnant then?' asked Assad. Judging by the number of family members in his photos, it was a feminine condition with which he was quite familiar.
Jussi Adler-Olsen