Quotes by Danish Authors - Page 2

Life is like a beautiful melody, only the lyrics are messed up.
Hans Christian Andersen
I WILL FOLLOW ANYONE... AND DEMONSTRATE TO EVERYONE... THAT THEIR FEAR IS GENUINE
Widad Akreyi
God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road.
Karen Blixen
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
In our secular world, we no longer see eternal paradise as a carrot at the end of the stick of life, but try to cram as much as possible into our relatively short time on the planet instead. This is, of course, a futile endeavour, doomed to failure. It is tempting to interpret the modern epidemics of depression and burnout as the individual's response to the unbearable nature of constant acceleration. The decelerating individual - who slows down instead of speeding up, and maybe even stops completely - seems out of place in a culture characterised by manic development, and may be interpreted pathologically (i.e. diagnosed as clinically depressed).
Svend Brinkmann
Grant not my prayers, when they are contrary to Thy will, which at all times must be the best. Oh, hear them not;
Hans Christian Andersen
Lord, What a terrible shame. You're so attractive!'I know, I want to tell her. It should have happened to someone really ugly. And then it wouldn't have mattered.
Liz Jensen
I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a. subjective side won't get us very far.
Niels Bohr
Will it take the rest of my life to process what has happened? I don't know.If Freddy were here, he would say, 'Yet', as per the rules of a playful accord we have concerning unacquired knowledge, whereby if one of us said they didn't know something, the other had to say 'Yet'. And then the other one--usually me--would provide the missing information, or we'd look it up, or just speculate.
Liz Jensen
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
Policy-makers continue to discover that they cannot solve today’s problems with yesterday’s mindsets
Widad Akreyi
Cantor illustrated the concept of infinity for his students by telling them that there was once a man who had a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, and the hotel was fully occupied. Then one more guest arrived. So the owner moved the guest in room number 1 into room number 2; the guest in room number 2 into number 3; the guest in 3 into room 4, and so on. In that way room number 1 became vacant for the new guest.What delights me about this story is that everyone involved, the guests and the owner, accept it as perfectly natural to carry out an infinite number of operations so that one guest can have peace and quiet in a room of his own. That is a great tribute to solitude.
Peter Høeg
But a mermaid has no tears, and therefore she suffers so much more.
Hans Christian Andersen
By seeing the multitude of people around it, by being busied with all sorts of worldly affairs, by being wise to the ways of the world, such a person forgets himself, in a divine sense forgets his own name, dares not believe in himself, finds being himself too risky, finds it much easier and safer to be like the others, to become a copy, a number, along with the crowd. Now this form of despair goes practically unnoticed in the world. Precisely by losing oneself in this way, such a person gains all that is required for a flawless performance in everyday life, yes, for making a great success out of life. Here there is no dragging of the feet, no difficulty with his self and its infinitizing, he is ground smooth as a pebble, as exchangeable as a coin of the realm. Far from anyone thinking him to be in despair, he is just what a human being ought to be. Naturally, the world has generally no understanding of what is truly horrifying.
Søren Kierkegaard
Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.
Niels Bohr
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
Peace requires the provision of a platform for discussion and the exchange of information on matters and activities relevant to the prevention of armed violence.
Widad Akreyi
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
Min ene sko knirker af mangel på stjerneskud
Benny Andersen
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
With age I have voluntarily chosen certain limitations. I don't have the energy to start over again. To learn new skills or fight my own personality or figure out diesel engines.
Peter Høeg
(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
All the sorrows of life are bearable if only we can convert them into a story.
Izak Dinesen
Out of love for mankind, and out of despair at my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing and was unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere.
Søren Kierkegaard
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?
Søren Kierkegaard
I will follow anyone...And remind everyone...Of enslaved Yazidi women...Raped...And forced...To donate blood to ISIS men...
Widad Akreyi
Hangovers are a vivid form of vengeance. Last night my apartment became the venue for a small, introverted chardonnay festival. A melancholy choir of Bulgarians provided the entertainment, via a set of headphones that ended up irredeemably tangled beneath the bed. Part of me just watched. The other part was in charge.
Liz Jensen
I can give her no greater power than she has already, said the woman; don't you see how strong that is? How men and animals are obliged to serve her, and how well she has got through the world, barefooted as she is. She cannot receive any power from me greater than she now has, which consists in her own purity and innocence of heart. If she cannot herself obtain access to the Snow Queen, and remove the glass fragments from little Kay, we can do nothing to help her.
Hans Christian Andersen
Joy passed, but happiness never completely disappeared; a touch of it would always remain to remind one it had been there. It was happiness that made one smile, then.
Anne Holm
Do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing? ... The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you are missing something.
Peter Høeg
The best gift you can give your children is to keep yourself emotionally, physically, spiritually and intellectually healthy.
Iben Dissing Sandahl
I'd like to thank my parents for making this night possible. And my children for making it necessary.
Victor Borge
To travel is to live.
Hans Christian Andersen
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
AK 47, is perfect copy, yes? Every detail. Like real thing. Yes. Kalashnikov. Your boy, he be happy for Uncle Sante, no?”“I’m sorry, Sante. It’s really nice of you, but I don’t want Sofus playing with guns.”Conversation between George Hanson and SanteIn The Shadow of Sadd
Steen Langstrup
Key message to all patients: Let go of all negativity and empower your body through your positivity.
Widad Akreyi
The world forgets easily, too easily, what it does not like to remember.
Jacob A. Riis
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
It is an alarming experience to be, in your person, representing Christianity to the natives.
Isak Dinesen
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
...the rationale for the existence of literature lies precisely in its ability to work on issues that concern us deeply. And it does so in a way that keeps our motivation at its highest intensity. Literature is fuel for 'hot cognition.' One may presume that imaginative literature is a property that all human cultures possess and as such may provide humans with an evolutionary advantage.
Mette Hjort
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
Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts.
Søren Kierkegaard
When it comes to peace, we need to facilitate peace-makers' personal engagement and their genuine desire to bridge the gap between advocacy knowledge and skills necessary to differentiate between theory and practice in the field of conflict management.
Widad Akreyi
Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.
Niels Bohr
You do not know what is better before you have tried what is worse.
Thomas Rathsach Strange
It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived—forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward- looking position.
Søren Kierkegaard
An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.
Niels Bohr
Most people believe that the Christian commandments are intentionally a little too severe - like setting a clock half an hour ahead to make sure of not being late in the morning.
Søren Kierkegaard
For the first time his mind grasped the fact that when life has sentenced you to suffer, the sentence is neither a fancy nor a threat, but you are dragged to the rack, and you are tortured, and there is no marvelous rescue at the last moment, no awakening as from a bad dream. He felt it as a foreboding which struck him with terror.
Jens Peter Jacobsen
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
If you have to wait for a long time, you have to seize hold of the waiting or it will become destructive. If you let things slide, your consciousness will waver, awakening fear and restlessness, then depression strikes, and you're pulled down.
Peter Høeg
...suddenly I got shivers down my spine thinking about how many different people one and the same person can be.
Janne Teller
If you are positive, you'll see opportunities instead of obstacles.
Widad Akreyi
I have read true piety defined as: loving one’s destiny unconditionally – and there is something in it. That is to say: I think that in a way this sort of “religiousness” is the condition for real happiness.
Karen Blixen
Man reaches the highest point of lovableness at 12 to 17 - to get it back in a second flowering at the age of 70 to 90.
Isak Dinesen
The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
Søren Kierkegaard
He looked at the little maiden, and she looked at him; and he felt that he was melting away, but he still managed to keep himself erect, shouldering his gun bravely.t A door was suddenly opened, the draught caught the little dancer and she fluttered like a sylph, straight into the fire, to the soldier, blazed up and was gone!t By this time the soldier was reduced to a mere lump, and when the maid took away the ashes next morning she found him, in the shape of a small tin heart. All that was left of the dancer was her spangle, and that was burnt as black as a coal.
Hans Christian Andersen
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
Shows itself in the notion that what may be objectively true may in the mouth of certain people become false.
Søren Kierkegaard