The Danish glee: the national version of cheerfulness.

I was always hearing that I was pale and thin and small.

I became an ardent, but never a specially good, dancer.

Poor is the power of the lead that becomes bullets compared to the power of the hot metal that becomes types.

My father, though, could run very much faster. It was impossible to compete with him on the grass. But it was astonishing how slow old people were. Some of them could not run up a hill and called it trying to climb stairs.

That a literature in our time is living is shown in that way that it debates problems.

A love for humanity came over me, and watered and fertilised the fields of my inner world which had been lying fallow, and this love of humanity vented itself in a vast compassion.

Birth was something that came quite unexpectedly, and afterwards there was one child more in the house.

I admired in others the strength that I lacked myself.

School is a foretaste of life.

The Danish glee: the national version of cheerfulness.

Being gifted needs courage.

Just about this time, when in imagination I was so great a warrior, I had good use in real life for more strength, as I was no longer taken to school by the nurse, but instead had myself to protect my brother, two years my junior.

Among the delights of Summer were picnics to the woods.

Any feeling that I was enriching my mind from those surrounding me was unfortunately rare with me.

But when I was twelve years old I caught my first strong glimpse of one of the fundamental forces of existence, whose votary I was destined to be for life - namely, Beauty.

Six hours a day I lived under school discipline in active intercourse with people none of whom were known to those at home, and the other hours of the twenty-four I spent at home, or with relatives of the people at home, none of whom were known to anybody at school.

When I was a little boy I did not, of course, trouble much about my appearance.

I was a town child, it is true, but that did not prevent me enjoying open-air life, with plants and animals.

I was at home then in the world of figures, but not in that of values.

He who does not understand a joke, he does not understand Danish.

I did not know what it was to be happy for a whole day at a time, scarcely for an hour.

But I did not find any positive inspiration in my studies until I approached my nineteenth year.

I encountered among my comrades the most varied human traits, from frankness to reserve, from goodness, uprightness and kindness, to brutality and baseness.

But my doubt would not be overcome. Kierkegaard had declared that it was only to the consciousness of sin that Christianity was not horror or madness. For me it was sometimes both.

My first experiences of academic friendship made me smile in after years when I looked back on them. But my circle of acquaintances had gradually grown so large that it was only natural new friendships should grow out of it.

It gradually dawned upon me that there was no one more difficult to please than my mother.

The stream of time sweeps away errors, and leaves the truth for the inheritance of humanity.

I came into the world two months too soon, I was in such a hurry.

I was not afraid of what I did not like. To overcome dislike of a thing often satisfied one's feeling of honour.

The person upon whom the schoolboys' attention centred was, of course, the Headmaster.

I was not given to looking at life in a rosy light.

The war imbued my tin soldiers with quite a new interest. It was impossible to have boxes enough of them.

On the whole, the world was friendly. It chiefly depended on whether one were good or not.

It was jolly in the country. A cow and little pigs to play with and milk warm from the cow.

Cheerfulness, sir, is the principle ingredient in the composition of health.

Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, and its power of endurance - the cheerful man will do more in the same time, will do it; better, will preserve it longer, than the sad or sullen.

Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.

You can't reason yourself back into cheerfulness any more than you can reason yourself into an extra six inches in height.

Early morning cheerfulness can be extremely obnoxious.

Cheerfulness, it would appear, is a matter which depends fully as much on the state of things within, as on the state of things without and around us.

The Danish glee: the national version of cheerfulness.

While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as though he were sure of it. If at the end your cheerfulness in not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful.

The principles of living greatly include the capacity to face trouble with courage, disappointment with cheerfulness, and trial with humility.

Being forced to work, and forced to do your best, will breed in you temperance and self-control, diligence and strength of will, cheerfulness and content, and a hundred virtues which the idle will never know.

Cheerfulness is the best promoter of health and is as friendly to the mind as to the body.

Poor David Hume is dying fast, but with more real cheerfulness and good humor and with more real resignation to the necessary course of things, than any whining Christian ever dyed with pretended resignation to the will of God.

Cheerfulness is a very great help in fostering the virtue of charity. Cheerfulness itself is a virtue.

As might be supposed, my parents were quite poor, but we somehow never seemed to lack anything we needed, and I never saw a trace of discontent or a failure in cheerfulness over their lot in life, as indeed over anything.