Quotes from Halldór Kiljan Laxness

A determinação e o destino são irmãos, e ambos repousam no mesmo coração.

Independence is the most important thing of all in life. I say for my part that a man lives in vain until he is independent. People who aren't independent aren't people. A man who isn't his own master is as bad as a man without a dog.

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.

Those who deck themselves out in stolen gods are not viable.

His being had rested full of adoration for the glory which unifies all distances in such beauty and sorrow that one no longer wishes for anything–in unconquerable adversity, in unquenchable longing he felt that life had nevertheless been worth while living.

My opinion has always been this," he said, "that you ought never to give up as long as you live, even though they have stolen everything from you. If nothing else, you can always call the air you breathe your own, or at any rate you can claim that you have it on loan.

Fegurðin og mannlífið eru tveir elskendur sem fá ekki að hittast.

But Bjartur wanted it to appear that his hospitality was a very minor issue. "The chief point," he said, "and the point towards which I have always directed my course, is independence. And a man is always independent if the hut he lives in is his own. Whether he lives or dies is his concern, and his only. Otherwise, I maintain, one cannot be independent. This desire for freedom runs in a man's blood, as anybody who has been servant to another understands.

The fact is that it is utterly pointless to make anyone a generous offer unless he is a rich man; rich men are the only people who can accept a generous offer. To be poor is simply the peculiar human condition of not being able to take advantage of a generous offer. The essence of being a poor peasant

The source of the greatest song is sympathy. Sympathy with Asta Sollilja on earth.

There is nothing so merciless as mankind. How can we justify ourselves, especially to the dumb animals around us? But the first days are always the worst, and there is much comfort in the thought that time effaces everything, crime and sorrow no less than love.

E isto é na verdade a essência da felicidade: poder esperar ansioso pela chegada do dia de amanhã.

The first thing is to have the will; the rest is technique.

What you have stolen can never be yours.

Like all great rationalists you believed in things that were twice as incredible as theology.

Maðurinn finnur það sem hann leitar að, og sá sem trúir á draug finnur draug.

One boy's footprints are not long in being lost in the snow, in the steadily falling snow of the shortest day, the longest night; they are lost as soon as they are made. And once again the heath is clothed in drifting white. And there is no ghost, save the one ghost that lives in the heart of a motherless boy, till his footprints disappear.

There is no more terrifying experience for a Christian than to discover he has suddenly become a rationalist.