Welcome to the web’s most comprehensive site of quotations by women. 43,939 quotations are searchable by topic, by author's name, or by keyword. Many of them appear in no other collection. And new ones are added continually.
Search by Topic:
Find quotations by TOPIC (coffee, love, dogs)
or search alphabetically below.
Search by Last Name:
Search by Keyword:
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.”
-
“The times when we need prayers or counsel, we are little like to be in a mood to learn, nor yet to understand.”
-
“No doing without some ruing ...”
-
“Aye, have you not heard that all evil drags a long tail behind it?”
-
“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.”
-
“... '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 ...”
-
“I saw not till now what sin brings with it — that we must tread others underfoot.”
-
“All things that a man owns hold him far more than he holds them.”
-
“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 ... ”
-
“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 ...”
-
“Bare is brotherless back --”
-
“All fires burn out at last.”
-
“Easy for them to keep their youth who will never learn a lesson ...”
-
“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 --”
-
“... Henrik was not made for climbing the tree of knowledge.”
-
“... 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.”
-
“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.”
-
“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, Norwegian novelist, Nobel Prize winner
(1881 - 1949)
Full name: Sigrid Undset Starsvad.