Finnish Love Quotes

Love leaped out in front of us like a murderer in an alley leaping out of nowhere, and struck us both at once. As lightning strikes, as a Finnish knife strikes! She, by the way, insisted afterwards that it wasn’t so, that we had, of course, loved each other for a long, long time, without knowing each other, never having seen each other…

love leaped out in front of us like a murderer in an alley leaping out of nowhere, and struck us both at once. As lightning strikes, as a Finnish knife strikes!

Ja joskus vielä ostaisin Miholle oman ilmalaivan ja tusinan täysiverisiä hevosia ja lakritsitehtaan ja kaikkien Aurosian hylättyjen rautatieasemien valtavat kellot.

It is said, once a wise man from the far North told me; it is said that there are in certain parts of Scandinavia cities within cities like there are circles within circles; existent yet invisible. And those cities are inhabited by creatures more terrible than imagination can create : man-shaped but man-devouring, as black and as silent as the night they prowl in.

Craftsman Ilmarinen wept Every evening for his woman, Weeping sleepless through the nights And fasting through the days; In the early hours complaining, Every morning sighing for her, Lamenting for his lovely lost one, For his dear one in the grave. For a month he swung no hammer, Did not touch the copper handle, and the clinking forge was silent. Said the craftsman Ilmarinen: "I poor fellow, do not know How to live or how survive; Sitting up or lying down Nights are long and time is tedious. I am troubled, low in spirit. 'Lonely are the nights now,lonely And the mornings dreary, dreary. In my sleeping I am troubled, But the waking is the saddest. It's not for evening that I'm lonely, Not for morning that I'm dreary, Not for olden times lamenting, But I'm lonely for my loved one, Dreary for the missing of her, Lamenting for my dark-browed lovely. 'Often in these days it happens, Happens in my midnight dreaming that I stretch my hand out touching, touching something that is nothing...

oikeastaan olisin vain halunnut kietoutua hänen ympärilleen, kuin rakkolevä hänen ympärilleen

Jos mun tuttuni tulisi, Ennen nähtyni näkyisi, Sille kättä käppäjäisin, Vaikk ois käärme kämmenpäässä, Sille suuta suikkajaisin, Vaikk ois suu suden veressä, Siitä kaulahan kapuisin, Vaikk ois kalma kaulan päällä, Vielä vierehen kävisin, Vaikk ois vierus verta täynnä.

This trial is a farce. The real prosecutor is not the state of Finland, but the government of one great power. The real defendants are not the persons who were picked on political grounds and now stand accused here. The real defendant is the Finnish people. The purpose of this trial is not to mete out maximum sentences on those accused, but for a Finnish court to declare that Finland was the aggressor in the war and that the Soviet Union was a peace-loving, wronged victim of an unjustified aggression. [Final statement during Soviet dictated "War-responsibility" mock trial, 1945]

Love leaped out in front of us like a murderer in an alley leaping out of nowhere, and struck us both at once. As lightning strikes, as a Finnish knife strikes! She, by the way, insisted afterwards that it wasn’t so, that we had, of course, loved each other for a long, long time, without knowing each other, never having seen each other […] Well, so she said she went out that day with yellow flowers in her hand so that I would find her at last, and that if it hadn’t happened, she would have poisoned herself, because her life was empty. Yes, love struck us instantly. I knew it that same day, an hour later, when, without having noticed the city, we found ourselves by the Kremlin wall on the embankment. We talked as if we had parted only the day before, as if we had known each other for many years. We arranged to meet the next day at the same place on the Moscow River, and we did. The May sun shone down on us. And soon, very soon, this woman became my secret wife. She used to come to me every afternoon, but I would begin waiting for her in the morning […] Bang goes the gate, bang goes my heart […] She would come through the gate once, but my heart would pound no less than ten times before that, I’m not lying.

Myself and my colleague Guy Madison (Dutton & Madison, 2017) inadvertently provided evidence for the Finnish inferiority complex in a study we did of every marriage between a Finn and a foreigner that took place in Finland in the year 2013. On average, males and females operate different sexual selection strategies. Males have nothing to lose from the sexual encounter, so it makes sense for them, if they can get away with it, to have as much sex as possible with as many different women as possible in order to maximise the probability that their genes will be passed on. Accordingly, they select for youth and beauty, as these are markers of fertility and health. The essence of beauty is a symmetrical face and a such face implies a low level of mutant genes and thus sound genetic health. Females operate differently. As we discussed briefly earlier, they have a great deal to lose from the sexual encounter, because they can become pregnant, which carries with it a range of social and physical costs. This makes them more selective. Specifically, they are sexually attracted to high status men as these men will have the resources to provide for them and their child, meaning that both of them are more likely to survive (Buss, 1989). So, socioeconomically, women ‘marry up’ (hypergamously) and men ‘marry down’ (hypogamously). We would expect that nationality would be an aspect of status. We tested this by ranking different nationalities based on various criteria and especially how wealthy a country was. We predicted that, among marriages between a Finn and a foreigner, Finnish women would to a greater extent marry men that were from countries ranked as higher status than Finland while Finnish men would disproportionately marry women from lower status countries. This is, overall, what we found. However, we specifically found that, whatever the objective national status differences, Finnish women married Western European and Anglophone (USA, Canada and so on) men while Finnish men married Eastern European and East Asian (including Japanese) women. This would imply, whatever the economic reality, that Finns regard themselves as inferior to pretty much all Western Europeans. It also indicates that the Japanese – who are far wealthier than the Finns – regard themselves as inferior to the Finns, presumably because there is some idolization of whiteness or, possibly, as has been argued by a Japanese anthropologist, the Japanese specifically adore Finnish culture (Mitsui, 2012).

The late nineteenth century witnessed the rise of Finnish-language schools and university education, something which mounted a direct challenge to the traditional dominance of Swedish. The result was a nationalist reaction by conservative ‘Svenomans’ who attempted to preserve the status of the Swedish minority. During World War I, they collaborated with the Germans, leading to a 1,900-strong Finland-Swede battalion being trained in Germany.

This extraordinarily bloody conflict lasted until 18th May 1918. Approximately 6000 Whites and 32,000 Reds were killed. In just 3 months, therefore, over 10% of the Finnish population were slain.

Finland loves to loop, and I was unprepared for how far they take it. It’s common for Finnish elementary schoolers to have the same teacher for multiple grades—not just two years in a row, but up to six straight years. Instead of just specializing in their subjects, teachers also get to specialize in their students. Their role evolves from instructor to coach and mentor. Along with delivering content, they’re able to help students progress toward their goals and navigate social and emotional challenges.

refrain among Finnish teachers captures it nicely: “The work of a child is to play.” In the United States, play is practiced in Montessori schools. In Finland, it’s mandated in the common core for all primary schools. The Finnish government insists that children play, because their policymakers understand that play fosters a love of learning. That’s a value best developed early on—and one that ultimately builds both better cognitive skills and better character skills.

The Finnish Orthodox writer Tito Colliander told a story about a monk who was once asked, “What do you do there in the monastery?” The monk replied, “We fall and get up, fall and get up, fall and get up again.”[22] This is a lovely picture of the spiritual journey: falling and getting back up, again and again over the course of a life. We will fail at pretty much everything written in this book. Often. Not just daily but, at least in the beginning, hourly. That doesn’t make you a bad apprentice; it just makes you human. The metaphor of walking with God is used all through Scripture; it comes as no surprise, so does its companion metaphor—stumbling. We will trip up, ignorantly lose our way, or even blatantly err and wander off the path at times. It’s not a question of if, but when. When we stumble, what then? We begin again.

The Finns also have a rather lovely word for the aurora borealis: revontulet, which translates as ‘foxfire’. The origins are supposedly in a Finnish fable, in which an Arctic fox, running through snow, sprayed up crystals with his tail, causing sparks to fly off into the night sky.

This would happen in any time period, but in an electronic age these processes are likely to occur much faster and have more profound effects. As trust levels continue to plummet, people stop trusting mainstream politicians and mainstream newspapers, a process we are already observing. They will begin to assume – as a matter of course – that these people and news sources are deceiving them and, as we have seen, on many key matters they will be correct. They will turn to alternative news sources and vote for alternative political figures. As jurist Cass Sunstein (2018) has explored, this will create an echo chamber effect whereby people will increasingly only be hearing the viewpoints which they already accept. This will help to further cement a divided, Balkanized, and untrusting society. Concomitantly, we will expect Finnish society – like all European societies – to become increasingly diverse in terms of worldview, as the ‘spiteful mutants’ spread their views which, through a virtue-signalling arms race to appear ever more caring, will become more and more extreme.

Indeed, trust is central to democracy and these processes have already damaged trust considerably, and will continue to disenfranchise citizens to the point that they may increasingly lose faith in democracy, regarding it as corrupt and a waste of time. They will vote for political parties that are suspicious of democracy, at least when the country is ruled by those whom they perceive to be enemies. Depending on their perspective, these parties will be of the far right or far left by current standards. Movements not unlike the Lapua Movement will gain traction in circumstances like this, as will groups from the extreme left. And the kind of generally wealthy people who become involved in Finnish politics – in Finland individual candidates must fund their own campaigns – will be increasingly distrusted and perceived as, essentially, ‘other;’ as not part of the in-group. This will, unfortunately, have ramifications for their safety, especially as people begin to blame those who advocated and enforced Multiculturalism for its future consequences.    This distrust will start to spread, like a disease, to other organs of the Finnish state. The police will be increasingly perceived – especially if they are seen to enforce unpopular policies with regard to not being allowed to criticise immigration – not as protectors of the Finnish people but as ‘enemies of the people.’ Distrust of the police, will result in the establishment of para-military forces of the kind that have been so prevalent in the recent history of Northern Ireland. This can already be observed with patrols in Finland by the Soldiers of Odin. If this seems too far fetched, it should be remembered that in the 1970s, trust in the police in strongly Catholic parts of Northern Ireland was so low that the British state simply had no control in many of these areas.

In his book Ethnic Conflicts, Tatu Vanhanen (2012) has shown that the more ethnically diverse a society is, the higher is the degree of ethnic conflict. Indeed, the correlation between a country’s ethnic diversity and its level and intensity of ethnic conflict is 0.66. The more ethnically diverse Finland becomes, the more conflict-ridden it will be and the more these conflicts will be based around ethnicity. In such circumstances, in which two groups are in conflict, Vanhanen shows that people tend to identify more strongly with their ethnic group and are more likely to perceive outsiders as an enemy. Thus, his research indicates that as the population of Finland becomes more ethnically-diverse, many Finns will probably develop their sense of Finnishness and become more nationalistic, while the foreigners will be decreasingly likely to integrate and will feel decreasingly Finnish. This is a recipe for a spiral into increasingly intense ethnic conflict; into low-level civil war.

Non avevo capito l'ultima frase. L'avevo guardata uscire dalla sua bocca, ne avevo inseguito brevemente il suono. Poi, senza accorgermene, il mio sguardo si era avventurato nel suo. Allora sentii allentarsi i muscoli del viso. Tutto dentro di me cedeva.