Top 80 Sigrid Undset Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “No one and nothing can harm us, child, except what we fear and love.”

— Sigrid Undset

2. “And when we give each other Christmas gifts in His name, let us remember that He has given us the sun and the moon and the stars, and the earth with its forests and mountains and oceans – and all that lives and move upon them. He has given us all green things and everything that blossoms and bears fruit and all that we quarrel about and all that we have misused – and to save us from our foolishness, from all our sins, He came down to earth and gave us Himself.”

— Sigrid Undset

3. “But I didn’t realize then that the consequence of sin is that you have to trample on other people.”

— Sigrid Undset

4. “All my days I have longed equally to travel the right road and to take my own errant path.”

— Sigrid Undset

5. “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

6. “I hated school so intensely. It interfered with my freedom.”

— Sigrid Undset

7. “All things that a man owns hold him far more than he holds them.”

— Sigrid Undset

8. “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

9. “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

10. “Pre-Christian paganism is a love poem to a God who remained hidden, or it was an attempt to gain the favour of the divine powers whose presence man felt about him. The new paganism is a declaration of war against a God who has revealed Himself.”

— Sigrid Undset

11. “God will find you,” said the priest quietly. “Stay calm and do not flee from Him who has been seeking you before you even existed in your mother’s womb.”

— Sigrid Undset

12. “Many a man is given what is intended for another, but no man is given another’s fate.”

— Sigrid Undset

13. “All fires burn out at last.”

— Sigrid Undset

14. “All that had happened and would happen was meant to be. Everything happens as it is meant to be.”

— Sigrid Undset

15. “I went to work in an office and learned, among other lessons, to do things I did not care for, and to do them well. Before I left this office, two of my books had already been published.”

— Sigrid Undset

16. “It is an easy matter, Olav, to be a good Christian so long as God asks no more of you than to hear sweet singing in church, and to yield Him obedience while He caresses you with the hand of a father. But a man’s faith is put to the test on the day God’s will is not his.”

— Sigrid Undset

17. “I hated school so intensely. It interfered with my freedom. I avoided the discipline by an elaborate technique of being absent-minded during classes.”

— Sigrid Undset

18. “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

19. “No doing without some ruing.”

— Sigrid Undset

20. “I’m not to blame, Ramborg, if a man’s heart is created in such a fashion that whatever is inscribed on it when it’s young and fresh is carved deeper than all the runes that are later etched.”

— Sigrid Undset

21. “Surely she had never asked God for anything except that He should let her have her will. And every time she had been granted what she asked for – for the most part. Now here she sat with a contrite heart – not because she had sinned against God but because she was unhappy that she had been allowed to follow her will to the road’s end.”

— Sigrid Undset

22. “Wherever they might wander out in the world, whithersoever they might fare, forgetful of their mother, she felt as though for her their life must still be an action of her life, they must still be as one with herself as they had been when she alone in all the world knew of the new life which lay hidden within and drank of her blood and made her cheeks pale.” –p. 329-30.”

— Sigrid Undset

23. “The morality code that remains after the religion that produced it is rejected is like the perfume that lingers in an empty bottle.”

— Sigrid Undset

24. “Dear sister – all other love is merely a reflection of the heavens in the puddles of a muddy road. You will become sullied too if you allow yourself to sink into it. But if you always remember that it’s a reflection of the light from that other home, then you will rejoice at its beauty and take good care that you do not destroy it by churning up the mire at the bottom.”

— Sigrid Undset

25. “As your pierced hands were stretched out on the cross, O precious Lord of Heaven. No matter how far a soul might stray from the path of righteousness, the pierced hands were stretched out, yearning. Only one thing was needed: that the sinful soul should turn toward the open embrace, freely, like a child who goes to his father and not like a thrall who is chased home to his stern master.”

— Sigrid Undset

26. “She saw the world as if in a vision: a dark room into which a beam of sunlight fell, with dust motes tumbling in and out, from darkness to light, and she felt that now she had finally moved into the sunbeam.”

— Sigrid Undset

27. “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

28. “All those wasted and squandered years when I did nothing but go around looking inside myself until I ended up alone even though I was surrounded by people. But I paid attention only to what was happenstance about them – not their true selves.”

— Sigrid Undset

29. “He felt as if the roots of his own life were intertwined with those of his brothers and sisters, somewhere deep down in the dark earth. Every blow that struck, every injury that ate away at the marrow of one of them was felt by all.”

— Sigrid Undset

30. “I was sent to a school because my father was already aware that his days were numbered, and he was anxious for me to acquire a good education and follow in his footsteps.”

— Sigrid Undset

31. “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

32. “If I were truly talented, as I once imagined I was, then I would have understood long ago that life is just about people.”

— Sigrid Undset

33. “Saint Olav turned her eyes toward Christ on the cross – see, Kristin: God’s love.”

— Sigrid Undset

34. “I wot well you are more more godly in such-like things that I can ever be – yet, Kristin, ’tis hard for me to see how it should be a right reading of God’s word to go on, as your way is, ever storing up wrath and never forgetting.”

— Sigrid Undset

35. “Most of my father’s life consisted of traveling to almost every part of Europe.”

— Sigrid Undset

36. “By the grace of God, we two unworthy souls were joined together in holy marriage. Branded by the flames of sin, bowed by the burdens of sin, we came together at the portals of God’s house; together we received the Savior’s Host from the hand of the priest. Should I now complain if God is testing my faith? Should I now think about anything else but that I am his wife and he is my husband for as long as we both shall live?”

— Sigrid Undset

37. “You tug and strain like a young horse when it’s first tied up at the stake, whenever you are tied by your heartstrings.”

— Sigrid Undset

38. “For I’ve realized more and more with each year I’ve lived: There is no worthier work for the person who has been geared with the ability to see even a small part of God’s mercy than to serve Him and to keep vigil and to pray for those people whose sight is still clouded by the shadow of worldly matters.”

— Sigrid Undset

39. “Dragons and all other creatures that serve the Devil only seem big as long as we harbor fear within ourselves. But if a person seeks God with such earnestness and desire that he enters into His power, then the power of the Devil at once suffers such a great defeat that his instruments become small and impotent. Dragons and evil spirits shrink until they are no bigger than goblins and cats and crows.”

— Sigrid Undset

40. “Stay calm and do not flee from Him who has been seeking you before you even existed in your mother’s womb.”

— Sigrid Undset

41. “They received food from the monks at the churches they visited, and when they drank the blood-red wine and broke off the golden crust from the bread made of wheat, all four priests from the barley lands understood why Christ had honored wine and wheat, which were purer than all other foodstuffs that God had given humankind, by manifesting himself in their likeness during the holy communion.”

— Sigrid Undset

42. “I’m not as good a man as you are. I can’t so easily forgive those I have wronged.”

— Sigrid Undset

43. “But it looked as if Brother Edvin had become so wrinkled simply from smiling at people. Kristin thought she had never seen anyone who looked so cheerful or so kind. He seemed to carry within him a luminous and secret joy, and she was able to share it whenever he spoke.”

— Sigrid Undset

44. “The blood that ran down from the cross in redemption for all sins and penance for all sorrows – that was the visible sign.”

— Sigrid Undset

45. “Then it occurred to me that many of these people had suffered more than Christ himself. “I pondered this until I felt that my heart and mind would burst. But finally I received the light that I had prayed and begged for. And I realized that just as they had suffered, so should we all have the courage to suffer. Who would be so foolish not to accept pain and torment if this was the way to a faithful and steadfast bridegroom who waits with open arms, his breast bloody and burning with love.”

— Sigrid Undset

46. “Easy for them to keep their youth who will never learn a lesson...”

— Sigrid Undset

47. “Prayers, fasts, everything he had practiced because he had been taught to do so, suddenly seemed new to him – weapons in a glorious war for which he longed. Perhaps he would become a monk – or a priest.”

— Sigrid Undset

48. “But when he saw her – if he but thought of her, a sense came over him as of the first breath of the plough-lands in spring, when the snows are but now melted and gone. He knew it now – it might have befallen him too – he, too, could have loved.”

— Sigrid Undset

49. “And I see you still don’t realize, no matter how many times you’ve witnessed it, that you can’t always manage alone everything that you’ve taken on. But I will help you to undertake this burden.”

— Sigrid Undset

50. “On her death bed: “And her tears burst forth in a swift stream, for it seemed to her that never before had she understood to the full what it betokened. The life that ring had wed her to, 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