Top 80 Knut Hamsun Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I have gone to the forest.”

— Knut Hamsun

2. “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.”

— Knut Hamsun

3. “I would be beholden to no man, not even for a blanket.”

— Knut Hamsun

4. “But things worked out. Everything works out. Though sometimes they work out sideways.”

— Knut Hamsun

5. “The whisper of the blood and the pleading of the bone marrow.”

— Knut Hamsun

6. “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.”

— Knut Hamsun

7. “Love is every bit as violent and dangerous as murder.”

— Knut Hamsun

8. “A word can be transformed into a coulour, light, a smell; it is the writer’s task to use it in such a way that it serves, never fails, can never be ignored.”

— Knut Hamsun

9. “I felt pleasantly empty, untouched by everything around me and happy to be unseen by all.”

— Knut Hamsun

10. “But now it was spring again, and spring was almost unbearable for sensitive hearts. It drove creation to its utmost limits, it wafted its spice-laden breath even into the nostrils of the innocent.”

— Knut Hamsun

11. “And love became the world’s origin and the world’s ruler, yet littered its path is with flowers and blood, flowers and blood.”

— Knut Hamsun

12. “Earth and sea merged, the sea tossed itself in the air in a fantastic dance, into the shapes of men and horses and tattered banners. I stood in the lee of an overhanging rock and thought of many things.”

— Knut Hamsun

13. “If she only knew that all of his poems had been written to her and no one else, every single one, even the one to Night, even the one to the Spirit of the Swamp. But that was something she should never know.”

— Knut Hamsun

14. “What is progress? That we can drive faster on the roads? No, progress is the rest the body needs and the peace the soul requires. Progress is man”s well being.”

— Knut Hamsun

15. “Out in the fjord I dragged myself up at once, wet with fever and exhaustion, and gazed landwards, and bade farewell for the present to the town – to Christiania, where the windows gleamed so brightly in all the homes.”

— Knut Hamsun

16. “You are right; I am not good at moving in society. Be merciful. You do not understand me; I live in the woods by choice – that is my happiness. Here, where I am all alone, it can hurt no one that I am as I am; but when I go among others, I have to use all my will power to be as I should.”

— Knut Hamsun

17. “One must know and recognize not merely the direct but the secret power of the word.”

— Knut Hamsun

18. “Asked what love is, some reply: It is only a wind whispering among the roses and dying away. But often it is an inviolable seal that endures for life, endures till death. God has fashioned it of many kinds and seen it endure or perish.”

— Knut Hamsun

19. “The dark monsters out there would suck me up when night came on, and they would carry me far across the sea and through strange lands where no humans lived.”

— Knut Hamsun

20. “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.”

— Knut Hamsun

21. “I lay with open eyes in a state of utter absence from myself and felt deliciously out of it.”

— Knut Hamsun

22. “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.”

— Knut Hamsun

23. “Young hearts have their unfathomable depths.”

— Knut Hamsun

24. “Love is God’s first word, the first thought that sailed through his mind. When he said: Let there by light! there was love. And he was well-pleased with what he had made, nor did he wish any of it unmade. And love was the world’s origin and the world’s ruler; but all its ways are filled with flowers and blood, flowers and blood.”

— Knut Hamsun

25. “Gladness is intoxicating. I fire my gun and an unforgettable echo answers from crag to crag, floats out over the sea and rings in some sleepless helmsman’s ears. What am I glad about? A thought that comes to me, a memory, a sound in the forest, a human being. I think of her – I close my eyes and stand still on the road and think of her, counting the minutes.”

— Knut Hamsun

26. “Truth is neither ojectivity nor the balanced view; truth is a selfless subjectivity.”

— Knut Hamsun

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

— Knut Hamsun

28. “I am not anyone to speak aloud of Adolf Hitler. His life and his actions do not invite sentimental emotions, because he was a warrior fighting for humanity, an apostle of the Gospel of the Rights of all peoples. He was a reformer of the highest rank. His historic destiny was to act in a time of unprecedented brutality, to which he eventually fell victim. So must any West European see Adolf Hitler. We, his followers, however, bow our heads before his disappearance.”

— Knut Hamsun

29. “Do not forget, some give little, and it is much for them, others give all, and it costs them no effort; who then has given most?”

— Knut Hamsun

30. “The heavy red roses smoldering in the foggy morning, blood-colored and uninhibited, made me greedy, and tempted me powerfully to steal one – I asked the prices merely so I could come as near them as possible.”

— Knut Hamsun

31. “There was a rock in front of my hut, a tall, gray rock. By its looks it seemed to be well-disposed toward me...”

— Knut Hamsun

32. “What have you done to your eyes? They’re all red. Have you been crying?’ ‘No,’ he answers, laughing, ’but I’ve been staring into my fairy tales, where the sun is very strong.”

— Knut Hamsun

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

— Knut Hamsun

34. “Well, bless my soul, what stupid creatures one has to mix with in this world!”

— Knut Hamsun

35. “I can’t even make up a rhyme about an umbrella, let alone death and life and eternal peace.”

— Knut Hamsun

36. “Love was God’s first word, the first thought that sailed across his mind. He said, Let there be light, and there was love.”

— Knut Hamsun

37. “It is the reign of Autumn, the height of the Carnival of Decay, the roses have got inflammation in their blushes, an uncanny hectic tinge, through their soft damask. I felt myself like a creeping thing on the verge of destruction, gripped by ruin in the midst of a whole world ready for lethargic sleep.”

— Knut Hamsun

38. “No, I don’t admire the genius. But I admire and love the result of the genius’s activity in the world, of which the great man is only the poor necessary tool, only, so to speak, the paltry awl to bore with.”

— Knut Hamsun

39. “A few days back someone sent me two feathers. Two bird’s feathers in a sheet of note-paper with a coronet, and fastened with a seal. Sent from a place a long way off; from one who need not have sent them back at all. That amused me too, those devilish green feathers.”

— Knut Hamsun

40. “The long, long road over the moors and up into the forest – who trod it into being first of all? Man, a human being, the first that came here. There was no path before he came.”

— Knut Hamsun

41. “Jeg er ikke frisk andre Steder end i Hodet.”

— Knut Hamsun

42. “I stood in the lee of an overhanging rock and thought of many things.”

— Knut Hamsun

43. “Rather than admire the mediocre great men over whom passersby nudge each other in awe, I venerate the young, unknown geniuses who die in their teens, their souls shattered – delicate, phosphorescent glowworms that one must see to know they really did exist.”

— Knut Hamsun

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

— Knut Hamsun

45. “It was weather for dreams; for little fluttering quests of the heart.”

— Knut Hamsun

46. “Language must resound with all the harmonies of music. The writer must always, at all times, find the tremulous word which captures the thing and is able to draw a sob from my soul by its very rightness.”

— Knut Hamsun

47. “I see stars before my eyes, and my thoughts are swept up into a hurricane of light.”

— Knut Hamsun

48. “No matter how much I kept telling myself that I was behaving like an idiot, it was no use.”

— Knut Hamsun

49. “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.”

— Knut Hamsun

50. “The writer must be able to revel and roll in the abundance of words; he must know not only the direct but also the secret power of a word. There are overtones and undertones to a word, and lateral echoes, too.”

— Knut Hamsun