These Scandinavian quotes will inspire you. Scandinavia is a subregion in Northern Europe, with strong historical, cultural, and linguistic ties.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging Scandinavian quotes, Scandinavian sayings, and Scandinavian proverbs.
Best Scandinavian Quotes
- “My influence is probably more from American crime writers than any Europeans. And I hardly read any Scandinavian crime before I started writing myself. I wasn’t a great crime reader to begin with.” ~ Jo Nesbo
- “Scandinavian crime fiction has become a great success all across the world and rightfully so. Sjowall and Wahloo ushered in a whole generation of Swedish crime writers, many of whom are now available in English.” ~ Camilla Lackberg
- “Firstly, there no such person as Death.
Second, Death’s this tall guy with a bone face, like a skeletal monk, with a scythe and an hourglass and a big white horse and a penchant for playing chess with Scandinavians.
Third, he doesn’t exist either.” ~ Neil Gaiman -
“They say that the best furniture and clothing design from the ’50s and ’60s is Scandinavian or Milanese.” ~ Christian Lacroix
- “Many Scandinavian writers who had made their name in literary fiction felt they wanted to have a go at the crime novel to show they could compete with the best. If Salman Rushdie had been Norwegian, he would definitely have written at least one thriller.” ~ Jo Nesbo
- “Naturally I never had the intention to offend or alienate Slavs. … What makes me different from the ‘nazis’ are basically three things; unlike them I am not socialistic (not even on a national level), I am not materialistic and I believe in (the ancient Scandinavian!) democracy.” ~ Varg Vikernes
- “Scandinavian-Danish cuisine was something quite rustic, mostly known for pastries and smorgasbord cuisine, which in itself has become a joke.” ~ Rene Redzepi
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“I thought I could organize freedom/How Scandinavian of me.” ~ Bjork
- “Nature confounds her summer distinctions at this season. The heavens seem to be nearer the earth. The elements are less reserved and distinct. Water turns to ice, rain to snow. The day is but a Scandinavian night. The winter is an arctic summer.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
- “I believe Western culture – rule of law, universal suffrage, etc. – is preferable to Arab culture: that’s why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I support immigration, but with assimilation.” ~ Mark Steyn
- “Please let him come, and give me the resilience & guts to make him respect me, be interested, and not to throw myself at him with loudness or hysterical yelling; calmly, gently, easy baby easy. He is probably strutting the backs among crocuses now with seven Scandinavian mistresses. And I sit, spiderlike, waiting, here, home; Penelope weaving webs of Webster, turning spindles of Tourneur. Oh, he is here; my black marauder; oh hungry hungry. I am so hungry for a big smashing creative burgeoning burdened love: I am here; I wait, and he plays on the banks of the river Cam like a casual faun.” ~ Sylvia Plath , Scandinavian quotes love
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“More humane societies are usually smaller, like the Scandinavian countries and Holland, where it is much easier to reach consensus and cooperation.” ~ David Korten
- “Whenever someone refers to me as someone “who happens to be black,” I wonder if they realize that both my parents are black. If I had turned out to be Scandinavian or Chinese, people would have wondered what was going on.” ~ Thomas Sowell
- “A dash derives from “to dash,” to shatter, strike violently, to throw suddenly or violently, hence to throw carelessly in or on, hence to write carelessly or suddenly, to add or insert suddenly or carelessly to or in the page. “To dash” comes from Middle English daschen, itself probably from Scandinavian-compare Danish daske, to beat, to strike. Ultimately the word is-rather obviously-echoic.” ~ Eric Partridge
- “Ever since the ’70s, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo were the godfathers of Scandinavian crime. They broke the crime novel in Scandinavia from the kiosks and into the serious bookstores.” ~ Jo Nesbo
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“The nature of Scandinavians is that they don’t talk so much, there will be these dark secrets, and most things are under-communicated.” ~ Jo Nesbo
- “My husband is from Finland, so every so often I’ll throw a Scandinavian-themed party.” ~ Sarah Rafferty
- “I suspect most self-described 18-year-old Scandinavian women named Inga who collect and wear string bikinis are, in reality, more likely to be middle-aged, pot-bellied guys named Lou who collect and wear string cheese.” ~ Pat Sajak
- “It is my express wish that in awarding the [Nobel Prizes] no consideration be given to the nationality of the candidates, but that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be Scandinavian or not.” ~ Alfred Nobel
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“Last year, the Assembly of the League, as a result of the initiative taken by the Scandinavian nations, further limited and clarified all the provisions of the clause prescribing the duty of states to participate in sanctions” ~ Hjalmar Branting
- “My favourite shows of the year are House of Cards, the Scandinavian versions of The Killing and The Bridge, and my guilty pleasure is everything MMA. Ultimate Fighter is amazing.” ~ Ricky Gervais
- “We’re not troubled at all, but I think…Well, we’re Scandinavians! We’re Vikings and we have a lot of blackness in our souls.” ~ Nina Persson
- “I think Scandinavian Paganism, to us here, is more interesting than any other. It is, for one thing, the latest; it continued in these regions of Europe till the eleventh century; 800 years ago the Norwegians were still worshipers of Odin. It is interesting also as the creed of our fathers; the men whose blood still runs in our veins, whom doubtless we still resemble in so many ways.” ~ Thomas Carlyle
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“Tiny as a sparrow, fierce as an eagle, Lisbeth Salander is one of the great Scandinavian avengers of our time, an angry bird catapulting into the fortresses of power and wiping smiles off the faces of smug, predatory pigs.” ~ A. O. Scott
- “I usually get up not before 9. I have a huge library – I’m a big fan of Scandinavian crime fiction – so I’ll usually take a book and go off to one of my favorite bistros for a cappuccino or espresso or maybe I’ll have some lovely smoked salmon for breakfast.” ~ Anthony Geary
- “But if I were asked to pick one constant, one quality that seems dependable, immutable, endlessly available, I’d say that it was intensity. For nothing in Sicily seems withheld, done half way, restrained or suppressed. There’s nothing to correspond to say, the ironic, the cerebral remove at which a Frenchman might consider an idea or a question, or the Scandinavian distrust of the sloppy, emotive response.” ~ Francine Prose
- “Your mind is your spirit; do not seek any other hidden soul inside you! All is in the brain! The depiction of a spirit rising to the sky is no more real than a medieval Scandinavian fairytales!” ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan
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“No doubt there is a Scandinavian wave. I guess everybody is just surfing their wave until it breaks and hoping it won’t be too soon.” ~ Tobias Lindholm
- “I like living in Vancouver .It’s more a matter of being a Vancouver loyalist. Harking back to what I said about growing up with the inherent violence in the southern U.S., I’m deeply enamoured of, and entirely used to living in a society with gun laws akin to those of a Scandinavian social democracy .It’s a good thing.” ~ William Gibson
- “I’m a Scandinavian Midwest girl who doesn’t always know what’s going on in herself emotionally, which is why I make music in order to figure it out.” ~ Erika M. Anderson
- “You forget, when you’re in the Scandinavian countries, you forget they don’t speak English first and they speak better than I do.” ~ Doug Stanhope
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“The English language took in many many fertilizations, many many genes, from other languages, from foreign languages – Latin, French, Nordic languages, German, Scandinavian languages.” ~ Amos Oz
- “I think the way we look upon gender is that we’re realizing that we’re not that different, which is a good thing. The United States needs to come further with that. In the Scandinavian countries, we’ve come further when it comes to gender politics and how we look upon gender and how women are treated in general.” ~ Joel Kinnaman
- “There were tons of bronzed Scandinavian types at the Sorbonne. Marvellously blond and healthy and shining white teeth. Funny thing though, because someone told me that if you actually go to Scandinavia none of the people who actually live there look like that. It’s just a front they put up when they’re abroad.” ~ Charlotte Bingham
- “The Norse way of speaking, no one really knew what the Vikings sounded liked, they were Norsemen. The accent is really a combination of a Scandinavian accent, maybe with a Swedish accent and an old way of speaking.” ~ Katheryn Winnick
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“There are some long silences in Scandinavian and some Japanese films, when the audience knows action is taking place, but the audience hears no action.” ~ John Henrik Clarke
- “I always joke that I’m a British actress trying to break into Scandinavian TV.” ~ MyAnna Buring
- “I was a journalism major, and I would take creative writing classes as part of that, but I would also look for opportunities to write stories for some of my other classes. So for my course in Scandinavian history, I asked if I could write historical fiction instead of term papers. Sometimes they’d say yes.” ~ George R. R. Martin
- “I am the first prime minister of this country of neither English nor French origin. So I determined to bring about a Canadian citizenship that knew no hyphenated consideration….I’m very happy to be able to say that in the House of Commons today in my party we have members of Italian, Dutch, German, Scandinavian, Chinese and Ukrainian origin and they are all Canadians.” ~ John Diefenbaker
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“The Scandinavians are dear people but they’ve never been what you might call bywords for wit and sparkle, have they?” ~ Kingsley Amis
- “And it is practically the same in the case of the four or five million poor peasants in France, and also for Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, and two of the Scandinavian countries. Everywhere small and medium sized industry prevails.” ~ Herman Gorter
- “I have declared again and again that if I say Aryans, I mean neither blood nor bones, nor hair nor skull; I mean simply those who speak an Aryan language. In that sense, and in that sense only, do I say that even the blackest Hindus represent an earlier stage of Aryan speech and thought than the fairest Scandinavians. To me an ethnologist who speaks of Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar.” ~ Max Muller
- “We still retain in Britain a deeper sense of class, a more obvious social stratification, and stronger class resentments, than any of the Scandinavian, Australasian, or North American countries.” ~ Anthony Crosland
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“You can count on Scandinavian literature for a certain kind of darkness, a modern mythic style.” ~ Chris Abani
- “Fifteen hundred years is ample time in which to lose mutual comprehension. Iceland was colonized by the Norwegians at the end of the ninth century AD. Today’s Icelanders, with considerable effort, can understand people from the Scandinavian peninsula, but the Scandinavians hardly understand the Icelanders. A thousand years is the minimum time span for a language to change so much that it becomes incomprehensible.” ~ Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza
- “As Stephen Jay Gould pointed out in Time, in no other Western country is the teaching of Evolution regarded as controversial. Throughout the world, one way or another, most Christian denominations have managed to reconcile belief in God with belief in the mechanisms of natural selection. A French or German or Scandinavian politician who called for students to entertain as a reasonable deduction from existing evidence the proposition that Earth is at most 10,000 years old would be bundled off to a mental hospital.” ~ Katha Pollitt
- “You know, ‘Viggo’ is a pretty dorky name in Denmark. It’s like ‘Oswald’ or something. It’s a very old Scandinavian name, at least 1,000 years old.” ~ Viggo Mortensen
