16 Quotes by Jens Peter Jacobsen

He yearned for a thousand tremulous dreams, for cool and delicate images, transparent tints, fleeting scents, and exquisite music from streams of highly strung, tensely drawn silvery strings – and then silence, the innermost heart of silence, where the waves of air never bore a single stray tone, but where all was rest unto death, steeped in the calm glow of red colors and the languid warmth of fiery fragrance.

What can it be, do you think? A hidden nerve that’s given way? Or something we have failed in or sinned against in ourselves, perhaps – who knows? A soul is such a fragile thing, and no one knows how far the soul extends in a human being. We ought to be good to ourselves –.

So Niels grows up, and all the influences of his childhood work on the plastic clay. Everything helps to shape it; everything is significant, the real and the dreamed, what is known and what is foreshadowed – all add their touch, lightly but surely, to that tracery of lines which is destined to be first hollowed out and deepened and afterwards flattened out and smoothed away.

I don’t know how it is, but I am so tired of commonplace happiness and commonplace goals.

The time that passes with goodness will not return with evil; and nothing experienced in life later on can make one day wither or erase one hour of the life that has been lived.

Of all the emotional relationships in life, is there any more delicate, more noble, and more intense than a boy’s deep and yet so totally bashful love for another boy? The kind of love that never speaks, never dares give way to a caress, a glance, or a word, the kind of vigilant love that bitterly grieves over every shortcoming or imperfection in the one who is loved, a love which is longing and admiration and negation of self, and which is pride and humility and calmly breathing happiness.

She dreamed a thousand dreams of those sunlit regions and was consumed with longing for this other and richer self, forgetting – what is so easily forgotten – that even the fairest dreams and the deepest longings do not add an inch to the stature of the human soul.