40 quotes
Icelanders! You are the descendants of Nordic vikings! Down with Irish slaves!
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940)
Hope springs eternal in the human breast. (Original to Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (1734))
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940)
Hauling fish from the sea—what endless toil. One could almost say, what an eternal problem.
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940)
Work on the one side, the home on the other—they were two walls in the one prison.
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940)
Ólafur Kárason had always kept to himself and did not interfere in other people's affairs; it sometimes also happened that he was not very familiar with his own affairs.
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940)
The correct understanding of life, let me tell you, is love despite everything. Love despite everything, that is the aim and object of life. Love, you see, is the only thing that pays in the long run, even though it might seem a dead loss in the short run.
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940)
The love which demands nothing but beauty itself and lives in selfless worship . . . is the love that no disappointment can ever conquer, perhaps not even death itself (if that existed).
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940)
My image will soon be obliterated; it was only an illusion. But even though I may fall, even though my image may be obliterated, there is one thing that will never fall and can never be obliterated, and that is the yearning of those in chains for liberty.
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940)
They thought I was an Icelander! But I'm no Icelander, s'help me!
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940)
Oh, it's so good to be dead!
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940)
Tonight when I listen to our voices in this strange calm which is touched with the presence of death, even though the breeze is rustling so innocently at the door and the roof, I feel as if we were two gods on the clouds of heaven, with mankind dying between us.
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940)
[T]o anyone who weeps, life has some importance.
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940)
It was not much fun being called a ghost for more than two hundred years, and each time a calf fell into a pool or a cow went dry or the roof fell in on people, it was always that damned ghost.
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940)
Do you know that these mountains you're looking at don't really exist at all? Or can't you see that they belong more to the sky than the earth? All this enchanting blueness which enthralls you is an illusion.
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940)
Every transgression is a game, every grief easy to bear compared with having discovered beauty; it was at once the crime that could never be atoned and the hurt that could never be assuaged, the tear that could never be dried.
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940)
If I have a face that rejoices in God's grace, my brother, it is because I have learned more from those who have lived within these [prison] walls than from those who live outside them. I have learned more from those who have fallen down than those who have remained upright.
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940)
The worth of any deed depends on how it is assessed by the onlookers . . . once you have made yourself look ridiculous, you go on being ridiculous whatever you do, perhaps for the rest of your life.
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940)
The poet felt completely free now as he stood there on the deck in his collar and boots, sailing past new and ever newer districts; even if he did not own this land's resources, he owned its beauty.
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940)
It is both more difficult and more complicated to die than people think. Even though the soul craves for nothing but extinction and oblivion forever, the body is a conservative master which will not give up until the very end.
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940)
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.
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940)