Sigrid Undset Quotes

20 Sourced Quotes

Groves and hill-sward smelt sweet; and as soon as the sun was down there streamed out all around the strong, cool, sourish breath of sap and growing things — it was as though the earth gave out a long, lightened sigh.

Sigrid Undset
It's a good thing when you don't dare do something if you don't think it's right. But it's not good when you think something's not right because you don't dare do it.

Sigrid Undset
Through the pitchy darkness that was coming she saw the glimmer of another, milder sun, she smelt the scent of the herbs in the garden at the world's end.

Sigrid Undset
Easy for them to keep their youth who will never learn a lesson.

Sigrid Undset
Many a man is given what is intended for another, but no man is given another's fate.

Sigrid Undset
So rich had been those years that they seemed to her now to have been one great calm — even as there seems a sort of calm on a billowy sea when one stands high enough above it on a great cliff. The waves that chase each other seem everlasting and unchanging.

Sigrid Undset
The life... that she had complained against, had murmured at, had raged at and defied — none the less she had loved it so, joyed in it so, both in good days and evil, that not one day had there been when 'twould not have seemed hard to give it back to God, nor one grief that she could have forgone without regret —

Sigrid Undset
All my days I have longed equally to travel the right road and to take my own errant path.

Sigrid Undset
One cannot escape dogmas—those who hold most firmly to dogmas today are those whose only dogma is that dogmas should be feared like the plague.

Sigrid Undset
The most dangerous temptations are not due to the active, sudden flames of desire, 'the lusts of the flesh,' but to the disinclinations of the flesh, its indolence and sluggishness, our tendency to become creatures of habit.

Sigrid Undset
All things that a man owns hold him far more than he holds them.

Sigrid Undset
In all the years when I did not know what to believe in and therefore preferred to leave all beliefs alone, whenever I came to a place where living water welled up, blessedly cold and sweet and pure, from the earth's dark bosom, I felt that after all it must be wrong not to believe in anything.

Sigrid Undset
I am not so foolish as to murmur, if now, since I have drunk up my wine and beer, I have to put up with skimmed milk and sour.

Sigrid Undset
The sun was shining but it had rained hard during the night so the streams were splashing and singing everywhere on the hillsides, and wisps of fog drifted below the mountain slopes. But above the crests, white fair-weather clouds climbed into the blue sky, and Lavrans and his men said it was going to be a hot day later on.

Sigrid Undset
I saw not till now what sin brings with it — that we must tread others underfoot.

Sigrid Undset
The times when we need prayers or counsel, we are little like to be in a mood to learn, nor yet to understand.

Sigrid Undset
Aye, have you not heard that all evil drags a long tail behind it?

Sigrid Undset
'Tis well when we dare not do a thing we think is not good and fair; but not so well when we think a thing not good and fair because we dare not do it.

Sigrid Undset
Feelings of longing seemed to burst from her heart; they ran in all directions, like streams of blood, seeking out paths to all the places in the wide landscape where she had lived, to all her sons roaming through the world, to all her dead lying under the earth.

Sigrid Undset
No one and nothing can harm us, child, except what we fear and love.

Sigrid Undset