Top 72 Halldor Laxness Quotes
#1. So I see no reason why, just because a couple of womenfolk have kicked the bucket, people should start writing religion about them.
Halldor Laxness
#2. Remember, any lie you are told, even deliberately, is often a more significant fact than a truth told in all sincerity.
Halldor Laxness
#4. People don't have the imagination to understand politicians. People are too innocent
Halldor Laxness
#5. It was pretty miserable wretches that minded at all whether they were wet or dry. He could not understand why such people had been born. "It's nothing but damned eccentricity to want to be dry" he would say. "I've been wet more than half my life and never been a whit the worse for it.
Halldor Laxness
#6. From the very first, my countrymen have followed my literary career, now criticizing, now praising my work, but hardly ever letting a single word be buried in indifference.
Halldor Laxness
#7. Was this perhaps life, then? - to have loved one summer in youth and not to have been aware of it until it was over, some sea-wet footprints on the floor and sand in the prints, the fragrance of a woman, soft loving lips in the dusk of a summer night, sea birds; and then nothing more; gone.
Halldor Laxness
#8. The light of the world had more or less taken leave of this man, for he was almost blind.
(from 'The Fish can Sing')
Halldor Laxness
#9. When I was a child I was told that whoever swallowed a hock-bone would one day own land," she said. "Have you tried that? I was told a sheep's hock-bone bought a croft, a cow's an estate.
Halldor Laxness
#11. Icelanders are grateful to meet foreigners who have heard of their country. And even more grateful to hear someone say it deserves better.
Halldor Laxness
#12. Two human beings have such difficulty in understanding each other - there is nothing so sad as two human beings.
Halldor Laxness
#13. Whoever doesn't live in poetry cannot survive here on earth.
Halldor Laxness
#14. All birds are perhaps a little wrong, because an absolute once-and-for-all formula for a bird has never been found, just as all novels are bad because the correct formula for a novel has never been found.
Halldor Laxness
#15. Grandma took her wheel and spun.
And the wheel-whir of the long days filled the croft; and this one wheel spinning was like the wheel of time, which carries our souls away to its own land.
Halldor Laxness
#17. The life of man is so short that ordinary people simply cannot afford to be born
Halldor Laxness
#18. A new generation forgets the specters that may have tormented the old ... And yet, always, to all eternity, it is the same specter assailing the same man century after century.
Halldor Laxness
#19. It's an old saying that one still has to know something, despite everything.
Halldor Laxness
#20. A fat servant is not much of a man. A beaten servant is a great man, because in his breast freedom has its home.
Halldor Laxness
#21. In Brekkukot, words were too precious to use
because they meant something; our conversation was like pristine money before inflation; experience was too profound to be capable of expression; only the bluebottle was free.
Halldor Laxness
#22. Somewhere, out in the infinite distance, lay the spring, at least in God's mind, like babies that are not yet conceived in the mother's womb.
(from "The Fish can Sing")
Halldor Laxness
#23. No one is so busy that he hasn't the time to dismantle a work of art.
Halldor Laxness
#24. Love of, and respect for, the humble routine of everyday life and its creatures was the only moral commandment which carried conviction when I was a child.
Halldor Laxness
#25. Quite apart from how debased Nature becomes in a picture, nothing seems to me to express so much contempt for Nature as a painting of Nature.
Halldor Laxness
#26. It is both more difficult and more complicated to die than people think.
Halldor Laxness
#27. My thoughts fly to the old Icelandic storytellers who created our classics, whose personalities were so bound up with the masses that their names, unlike their lives' work, have not been preserved for posterity.
Halldor Laxness
#28. Of all the creatures that man kills for his amusement there is only one that he kills out of hatred - other men. Man hates nothing as much as himself. That is why war is called the leprosy of the human soul.
Halldor Laxness
#29. Immoral women do not exist", said the organist. "That this only a superstition. On the other hand there exist women who sleep thirty times with one man, and women who sleep once with thirty men.
Halldor Laxness
#30. I'm an extremely wealthy man. I own the sky. I have invested all my capital in the sun. I'm not bad-tempered, as you seem to imagine, nor do I bear grudges. But like all wealthy men, I'm a little frightened of losing my fortune.
Halldor Laxness
#31. Nothing is true that cannot be proven
and therefore, it's not true.
Halldor Laxness
#32. She herself had given up washing long ago, and besides, people no longer believed in stale urine, either for one purpose or another.
Halldor Laxness
#33. Life in Oseyri was lived in fish and consisted of fish, and human beings were a sort of abortion which Our Lord had made out of cooked fish and perhaps a handful of rotten potatoes and a drop of oatmeal gruel.
Halldor Laxness
#34. There is no more terrifying experience for a Christian than to discover he has suddenly become a rationalist.
Halldor Laxness
#36. It's a pity we don't whistle at one another, like birds. Words are misleading.
Halldor Laxness
#37. Can't you hear how everyone tells lies; if not deliberately, then involuntarily; if not out loud, then silently?
Halldor Laxness
#38. You have fettered yourself of your own free will, man-break the fetters!
Halldor Laxness
#39. Like most people who actually live by a landlocked sound, bereft of hope of happiness, he had a particular aversion to any doctrines which left people without hope of happiness and told them that they lived by a landlocked sound.
Halldor Laxness
#40. Children should live a wholesome and natural life and go about with a mussel in one corner of their mouths and a shrimp in the other instead of sweets.
Halldor Laxness
#41. Strange though it may seem, people rarely show such enthusiasm as when they are seeking the proof of a ghost story - the soul gathers all this sort of thing to its hungry bosom.
Halldor Laxness
#42. He did not know what to say in the face of such sorrow. He sat in silence by his sister's side in the spring verdure, which was too young; and the hidden strings in his breast began to quiver; and to sound.
This was the first time that he had ever looked into the labyrinth of the human soul.
Halldor Laxness
#43. Like all great rationalists you believed in things that were twice as incredible as theology.
Halldor Laxness
#44. For once the crofter was at a a rather loss for words, for to him nothing has ever been more completely unintelligible than the reasoning that is bred of tears.
Halldor Laxness
#45. Well, well, it's enough to make the lice drop dead from my head! Condescend to enter the house.
Halldor Laxness
#46. A wise man once said that next to losing its mother, there is nothing more healthy for a child than to lose its father.
Halldor Laxness
#48. A land even more remote, America, which is farther than death.
Halldor Laxness
#49. But perhaps no distance is greater than that which separates a poor family in the same country
Halldor Laxness
#50. On the other hand I won't conceal the fact from anyone that once upon a time a little something happened to me. I saw a little something. But never except just that once.
Halldor Laxness
#51. Where the glacier meets the sky, the land ceases to be earthly, and the earth becomes one with the heavens; no sorrows live there anymore, and therefore joy is not necessary; beauty alone reigns there, beyond all demands.
Halldor Laxness
#52. It is a matter of simple fact that Icelanders have always been notoriously indolent.
Halldor Laxness
#53. Presently the small of coffee began to fill the room. This was morning's hallowed moment. In such a fragrance the perversity of the world is forgotten, and the soul is inspired with faith in the future ...
Halldor Laxness
#54. But I was also very pleased when I heard the Prince of Montenegro got married the other day. I know perfectly well that I am nothing to anyone. But the middle finger is no longer than the pinkie if one measures both against infinity ...
Halldor Laxness
#56. And yet he did not find the happiness he had dreamed of, nor the peace he had so much desired, and she understood him, and loved him for that very reason, that he had found neither happiness nor peace; deep, deep inside her she loved him because he had fled.
Halldor Laxness
#57. All great wealth was inconsistent with common sense.
(from 'The Fish can Sing
Halldor Laxness
#58. Among other things, the catechism said: "Ill treatment of animals bears witness to a cruel and godless heart." The boy recited, "A hundred and eleven treatment of animals bears witness to a cruel and godless heart.
Halldor Laxness
#59. The leak that comes from the outside harms no one,' he stated once more. 'It is the leak that one finds indoors that is the worst.' When one is unmarried, one must tell people to shut up in a roundabout fashion.
Halldor Laxness
#60. I spent my entire childhood in an environment in which the mighty of the earth had no place outside story books and dreams.
Halldor Laxness
#61. For man is essentially alone, and one should pity him and love him and grieve with him.
Halldor Laxness
#62. The world is a song, but we do not know whether it is a good song because we have nothing to compare it with.
Halldor Laxness
#63. Asta Sollilja slept on, her head in the corner, mouth open, chin up, and head back, with one hand under her ear and the other half-open on the coverlet as if she thought in her sleep that someone would come and lay happiness in her palm.
Halldor Laxness
#64. History is always entirely different to what has happened.
Halldor Laxness
#65. Is it not amazing that around a man as cold as I am, there should always be fire? Sometimes it tries to burn me, but I usually collect my things and leave.
Halldor Laxness
#66. Those who deck themselves out in stolen gods are not viable.
Halldor Laxness
#67. It's a useful habit never to believe more than half of what people tell you, and not to concern yourself with the rest. Rather keep your mind free and your path your own.
Halldor Laxness
#68. That blasted family could never look at a living thing without wanting to make a profit out of it, preferably by killing it.
Halldor Laxness
#69. A free man can live on fish.Independence is better than meat
Halldor Laxness
#70. Don't forget that few people are likely to tell more than a small part of the truth: no one tells much of the truth, let alone the whole truth. Spoken words are facts in themselves, whether true or false. When people talk they reveal themselves, whether they're lying or telling the truth.
Halldor Laxness
#71. If you get into danger, either you perish or you escape.
Halldor Laxness
#72. The tyranny of mankind; it was like the obstinate drip of water falling on a stone and hollowing it little by little; and this drip continued, falling obstinately, falling without pause on the souls of the children.
Halldor Laxness
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