Life & Wisdom Quote by Knut Hamsun

Hamsun gives you the sigh of someone who has watched the grand passions of youth get repackaged and sold back to you as “experience.” “Heaven knows” lands like a dry aside: not a prayer, a shrug. He’s puncturing the romantic myth that only the young are swept up by desire, ideology, art, or catastrophe. Later life has its own currents strong enough to lift you off your feet; the difference is you feel the lift with the knowledge of what it costs.

The pivot - “What of it?” - is the real engine here. It dismisses the hunger for self-transformation as a kind of vanity. Being “carried away” is treated less as destiny than as a recurring human malfunction, a cycle you can predict even if you can’t always resist. Then comes the quiet provocation: “We remain what we are.” That line denies the modern faith in reinvention, suggesting character is stubborn, maybe even doomed. Yet Hamsun refuses pure bitterness. “No doubt” softens the fatalism into something like rueful acceptance, and “all very good for us” twists the knife: the very episodes that unmake our plans might be the ones that season us.

Context matters. Hamsun’s fiction often turns on impulses that feel natural and irrational at once; his narrators swing between self-mockery and self-justification. This quote carries that signature ambivalence: skepticism about progress, paired with an almost pastoral trust that life’s humiliations and infatuations still have a use. It’s not optimism. It’s a hard, Nordic kind of consent.