Norwegian Quotes

The majority is always wrong; the minority is rarely right.

Home life ceases to be free and beautiful as soon as it is founded on borrowing and debt.

People who don't know how to keep themselves healthy ought to have the decency to get themselves buried, and not waste time about it.

A forest bird never wants a cage.

The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.

A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.

A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed.

When good befalls a man he calls it Providence, when evil fate.

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 you have been generous enough to find in my work.

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 matters, the gift of youth.

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 of you with gifts, with flowers, with offerings of poetry - to be young once more, to ride on the crest of the wave.

No worse fate can befall a young man or woman than becoming prematurely entrenched in prudence and negation.

It is as well perhaps that this is not the first time I have been swept off my feet. In the days of my blessed youth there were such occasions; in what young person's life do they not occur?

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 understanding unless someone explains it to you.

I have had much to learn from Sweden's poetry and, more especially, from her lyrics of the last generation.

I have gone to the forest.

However, I must not indulge in homespun wisdom here before so distinguished an assembly, especially as I am to be followed by a representative of science.

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, no doubt, it is all very good for us!

For I mean to roam and think and make great irons red-hot.

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 to think idly and slowly as one does it.

In old age we are like a batch of letters that someone has sent. We are no longer in the past, we have arrived.

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 ill. Here am I in the forest, quite content.

You have to react to what's around you in the moment, whatever the music is. Just think of it as some place you have to enter and you need to find the key.

When we are on tour we also take chances.

There's a certain phraseology involved in jazz, and I've moved away from that.

The only element of jazz that I keep is improvisation.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails, but that's what we face when we're dealing with improvisation.

If you feel you have the right key, you try to make some phrase or sound that will fit.

I feel very strongly when there's no chance for me to find a key to a piece.

Coltrane was moving out of jazz into something else. And certainly Miles Davis was doing the same thing.