Karl Ove Knausgard Quotes

Literature is my life of course, but from an ontological point of view. From an existential point of view, I like being a teacher.

Teaching in the upper elementary grades had given me a deep appreciation of the gifts and graces that are specific to individuals with ten or eleven years of experience as human beings. It is, I think, a magical time - when so much has been learned, but not yet enough to entirely extinguish the magical reach and freedom of early childhood.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Every child dances, and then you learn not to.

Life is half spent before we know what it is.

For me, no matter what movie I make, no matter what the genre or the budget, they all have the same theme at their core: fear of death and happiness about living.

In the end, I'm really interested in people and what we do with our short time here on earth. I'm interested in the human soul.

The purpose of life is living. Men and women should get the most they can out of their lives.

Human life [is] ... a process of filling in time until the arrival of death, or Santa Claus, with very little choice, if any, of what kind of business one is going to transact during the long wait.

It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living.

Life is a creation, not a discovery.

If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility of life is destroyed.

It is the acme of life to understand life.

Love is the measure of life; only so far as we love do we really live.

There are two things that you have to do in life: You have to die, and you have to live until you die. The rest is up to you.

What is life but a series of inspired follies.

We are not born to survive. Only to live.

There's gotta be more to life than chasing down every temporary high to satisfy me.

Despite the amount of suffering, pain, misery, sorrow and travail which can exist in life, the reason for existence is the same reason as one has to play a game-interest, contest, activity and possession. The truth of this assertion is established by an observation of the elements of games and then applying these elements to life itself.

The meaning of life is to get meaning for life.

Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.

They're basically moments in which you're in touch with the meaning of life, when your relationship to the rest of the universe makes sense.

The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow-creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life.

Where was it ever promised us that life on this earth can ever be easy, free from conflict and uncertainty, devoid of anguish and wonder and pain? Those who seek the folly of unrelieved 'happiness'-who fear moods, who shun solitude, who do not know the diginity of occasional depression-can find bliss easily enough: in tranquilizing pills, or in senility. The purpose of life is not to be happy.