Knut Hamsun Quotes

51 quotes in 975 categories

• Earth and sea merged, the sea tossed itself in the air in a fantastic dance, into the shapes of men and horses and tattered banners.…
• There is nothing like being left alone again, to walk peacefully with oneself in the woods. To boil one's coffee and fill one's pipe, and…
• But now the world breaks in on us, the world is shocked, the world looks upon our idyll as madness. The world maintains that no…
• I was conscious all the time that I was following mad whims without being able to do anything about it … . Despite my alienation…
• Were I more conversant with literature and its great names, I could go on quoting them ad infinitum and acknowledge my debt for the merit…
• In my solitude, many miles from men and houses, I am in a childishly happy and carefree state of mind, which you are incapable of…
• Heaven knows that there are plenty of opportunities in later life, too, for being carried away. What of it? We remain what we are and,…
• Today riches and honours have been lavished on me, but one gift has been lacking, the most important one of all, the only one that…
• I stood in the lee of an overhanging rock and thought of many things.
• When good befalls a man he calls it Providence, when evil fate.
• No, what I should really like to do right now, in the full blaze of lights, before this illustrious assembly, is to shower every one…
• What if one were up there, drifting about among suns and feeling the tails of comets fan one's forehead! How small the earth was and…
• Rather than admire the mediocre great men over whom passersby nudge each other in awe, I venerate the young, unknown geniuses who die in their…
• Great men are excellent topics of conversation, but the superior man, the superior men, the masters, the universal spirits on horseback, have to stop and…
• No, I don't admire the genius. But I admire and love the result of the genius's activity in the world, of which the great man…
• You are welcome to your intellectual pastimes and books and art and newspapers; welcome, too, to your bars and your whisky that only makes me…
• In old age we are like a batch of letters that someone has sent. We are no longer in the past, we have arrived.
• I have gone to the forest.
• I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.
• No worse fate can befall a young man or woman than becoming prematurely entrenched in prudence and negation.

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