Human beings, in point of fact, are lonely by nature, and one should feel sorry for them and love them and mourn with them. It is certain that people would understand one another better and...

Eins var algengt hjá okkur ef spurt var um líðan einhvers manns: iss hann er feitur; en það þýddi að honum liði vel, eða einsog sagt mundi vera í Danmörku, að hann væri hamingjusamur. Ef...

Man is more perfect than god. Although this woman’s doctrine, in which she was brought up from childhood, told her than all men were lost sinners, I have never heard her censure a man with...

The life of man is so short that ordinary people simply cannot afford to be born

The distinctive features of the world’s civilisations are not simply and solely the giraffe and the city of Rome, as the children may perhaps have been led to imagine on the first evening, but also...

Can’t we make a blusterer ourselves? asked Jón Hreggviðsson. Can’t we scratch that damned sign with the ax-point onto the chopping block and get a beautiful, chubby woman in here tonight, right now-or preferably three?...

That blasted family could never look at a living thing without wanting to make a profit out of it, preferably by killing it.

People don’t have the imagination to understand politicians. People are too innocent

When a man has a flower in his life he builds a house.

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...

The most remarkable thing about a man’s dreams is that they will all come true; this has always been the case, though no one would care to admit it. And a peculiarity of man’s behaviour...

He disliked tears, he has always disliked tears, had never understood them, and sometimes lost his temper over them; but he felt now that he could not rebuke this flower of his life, this innocent...

Shortly afterwards it started raining, very innocently at first, but the sky was packed tight with cloud and gradually the drops grew bigger and heavier, until it was autumn’s dismal rain that was falling—rain that...

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...

Remember that every day you quicken into motion waves that undulate on to the very confines of existence; you stir up waves that break upon the shores of eternity itself. And it is of much...

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”...

…freedom is of more account than the height of a roof beam. I ought to know; mine cost me eighteen years’ slavery. The man who lives on his own land is an independent man. He...

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.

My opinion has always been this. 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...

I know perfectly well that it is impossible, according to arithmetic and scholarly books, to live in a far valley off a handful of ewes and two low yield cows. But we live, I say....

A free man can live on fish.Independence is better than meat

Oh yes”, said the old woman, “but I’ve heard these so-called stoves are by no means all they are supposed to be. I never saw a stove in my day, and yet never ailed a...

The story of how He created the world aroused their interests immediately, even though they received no answer to the question of why He had to do it; but they found it difficult to understand...

Hef ég drepið mann eða hef ég ekki drepið mann? Hver hefur drepið mann og hver hefur ekki drepið mann? Hvenær drepur maður mann og hvenær drepur maður ekki mann? Fari í helvíti sem ég...

Often I felt that these men were play-acting: the unreality of their role was their security, even their own destinies were to them saga and folk-tale rather than a private matter; these were men under...

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.

Remember, any lie you are told, even deliberately, is often a more significant fact than a truth told in all sincerity.

Townsfolk have no conception of the peace that mother nature bestows, and as long as that peace is unfound the spirit must seek to quench its thirst with ephemeral novelties. And what is more natural...