Jens Peter Jacobsen Quotes & Sayings

I am not offended by your love, Mr.Bigum, but I condemn it. You have done what so many others do. People close their eyes to real life, they don't want to hear the 'no' it shouts at their wishes, they want to forget the deep chasm it shows them between their longing and what they long for. They want to realize their dreams. But life doesn't take dreams into account, there is not a single obstacle that can be dreamed away from reality, and so in the end they lie there wailing at the chasm, which has not changed but is the same as it has always been. — Jens Peter Jacobsen

Of what are you thinking now?" she asked.
"I am thinking of myself."
"That's just what I am doing."
"Are you also thinking of yourself?"
"No, of yourself - of you, Mogens. — Jens Peter Jacobsen

Break the ice, or draw that which lives in the dimness out into the full light of speech - what happens is the same: that which is now seen and now grasped is not, in its clearness, the shadowy thing that was. — Jens Peter Jacobsen

Love is like a diamond; for as a diamond is beautiful to look upon, so is love fair, but as the diamond is poison to any one who swallows it, in the same manner love is a kind of poison and produces a baneful raging distemper in those who are infected by it. — Jens Peter Jacobsen

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. — Jens Peter Jacobsen

It seemed to Niels that he understood everything: the hardness in her, the dreary humility, and her coarseness, which was the bitterest drop in the whole goblet. By degrees he came to see also that his delicacy and deferential homage must oppress and irritate her, because a woman who has been hurled from the purple couch of her dreams to the pavement below will quickly resent any attempt to spread carpets over the stones which she longs to feel in all their hardness. In her first despair she is not satisfied to tread the path with her feet: she is determined to crawl it on her knees, choosing the way that is steepest and roughest. She desires no helping hand and will not lift her head--let it sink down with its own heaviness, so that she may put her face to the ground and taste the dust with her tongue! — Jens Peter Jacobsen

He was weary of himself, of cold ideas and brain dreams. Life a poem? Not when you went about forever poetizing about your own life instead of living it. How innocuous it all was, and empty, empty, empty! This chasing after yourself, craftily observing your own tracks
in a circle, of course.
This sham diving into the stream of life while all the time you sat angling after yourself, fishing yourself up in one curious disguise or another! If he could only be overwhelmed by something
life, love, passion
so that he could no longer shape it into poems, but had to let it shape him! — Jens Peter Jacobsen

For the first time his mind grasped the fact that when life has sentenced you to suffer, the sentence is neither a fancy nor a threat, but you are dragged to the rack, and you are tortured, and there is no marvelous rescue at the last moment, no awakening as from a bad dream. He felt it as a foreboding which struck him with terror. — Jens Peter Jacobsen

There was no style in nature. — 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. — Jens Peter Jacobsen

And I have always loved you, and if it sometimes seems to me that it is only now that I really love you since we have met again, it is not true, however great my love may be, for I have always loved you, I have always loved you. And if it should happen now that you would become mine- you cannot imagine what that would mean to me, if you, who were taken from me for so many years, were to come back. — Jens Peter Jacobsen

Know ye not that there is here in this world a secret confraternity, which one might call the Company of Melancholiacs? That people there are who by natural constitution have been given a different nature and disposition than the others; that have a larger heart and a swifter blood, that wish and demand more, have stronger desires and a yearning which is wilder and more ardent than that of the common herd. They are fleet as children over whose birth good fairies have presided; their eyes are opened wider; their senses are more subtile in all their perceptions. The gladness and joy of life, they drink with the roots of their heart, the while the others merely grasp them with coarse hands. — Jens Peter Jacobsen

To learn is as beautiful as to live.
Do not be afraid to lose yourself in minds greater than your own. Do not sit brooding anxiously over your own individuality or shut yourself out from influences that draw you powerfully for fear that they may sweep you along and submerge your innermost pet peculiarities in their mighty surge. Never fear. The individuality that can be lost in the sifting and reshaping of a healthy development is only a flaw; it is a branch grown in the dark, which is distinctive only so long as it retains its sickly pallor. And it is by this sound growth in yourself that you must live. Only the sound can grow great. — Jens Peter Jacobsen

He was first of all a philosopher, but not one of the productive philosophers who find new laws and build new systems. He laughed at their systems, the snail-shells in which they dragged themselves across the illimitable field of thought, fondly imagining that the field was within the snail-shell! And these laws
laws of thought, laws of nature! Why, the discovery of a law meant nothing but the fixing of your own limitations: I can see so far and no farther
as if there were not another horizon beyond the first, and another and yet another, horizon beyond horizon, law beyond law, in an unending vista! No, he was not that kind of philosopher. — Jens Peter Jacobsen

And it all came to pass, all that she had hoped, but it did not fill her with rapture nor carry her away with the power or the fervor she had expected. She had imagined it all different, and had imagined herself different, too. In dreams and poems everything had been, as it were, beyond the sea; the haze of distance had mysteriously veiled all the restless mass of details and had thrown out the large lines in bold relief, while the silence of distance had lent its spirit of enchantment. It had been easy then to feel the beauty; but now that she was in the midst of it all, when every little feature stood out and spoke boldly with the manifold voices of reality, and beauty was shattered as light in a prism, she could not gather the rays together again, could not put the picture back beyond the sea. Despondently she was obliged to admit to herself that she felt poor, surrounded by riches that she could not make her own. — Jens Peter Jacobsen

He looked so strange and absentminded; quite obviously he had just been reading a book, one could tell that from the expression in his eyes, from his hair, from the abstracted way in which he managed his hands. — Jens Peter Jacobsen

Haven't you noticed that we women daydream infinitely less than you men? We can't anticipate pleasure in our imagination or keep suffering out our lives with some imaginary consolation.Whatever is,is.Imagintion! It's so paltry!Yes,when you've grown older,as I have,you occasionally make do with the poor comedy of the imagination. — Jens Peter Jacobsen

I don't know how it is, but I am so tired of commonplace happiness and commonplace goals. — Jens Peter Jacobsen

He did not think of love as an eternally vigilant, blazing flame, which with its powerful, flickering glow shown into all the peaceful folds of life and in some fantastic way made everything seem bigger and stronger than it was. For him, love was more like the calm, smoldering ember that gives off an even heat from its soft bed of ashes and in the muted twilight tenderly forgets what is distant and makes what is near seem twice as close and twice as intimate. — Jens Peter Jacobsen