Margrethe II of Denmark Quotes

I have always felt that it is a task that you are given, and that you have it as long as you live. That is my fundamental view. It is an integral part of the job that you have it for life.

Being Queen is a profession, a job, a position, an office that one cannot put aside when you come home from work. It is there all the time - and it is there all your life.

In spite of the many initiatives our society offers to help and support, recovery can be such a monumental task that some give up. They withdraw into themselves. Not least during Christmas and New Year is it hard to feel left out. Tonight my thoughts are with them.

For me it is always the colour, first and foremost.

Gradually he [King Frederik] showed me everybody was going to help me in this...it was not a terrifying thing, but a great challenge.

I would like to stress that the obligation [of being Queen] has always been driven by joy. The joy is rooted in the warmth that has met me and my family everywhere through every year, in celebration and joy as in sorrow, in the so-called "big days", as well as in everyday life.

I hope I will be able to paint as long as I live.

I think that people imagine protocol and etiquette as some kind of great dragon that hovers behind the pageantries of the palace to pounce on you and eat you up if you aren't behaving as you should. But in fact etiquette is saying how to do when you meet people, saying good night to your parents before going to bed, opening a door to a woman, getting up if an older person wants to sit down on the bus and it's all full, that is etiquette, or protocol, if you wish. At the everyday level, all the time, all of us. It's a way of knowing what you've got to do so that you have your mind free to do other things and think of other things.

Painting is not what my life is about, but it is very important to me, and I am very lucky to be able to give some time to it. The time that I devote to painting is not a lot of time, but I do it 100 percent while I am working, and then there's nothing else that counts.

I was supported from every side by my family and by the ministers, but so much also by the people.

There is nothing so clever as people you agree with.

We were so busy that we didn't have time to think about how terrible it was or - in fact it felt strangely natural.

In the course of the last few generations, society has developed in such a way that we can live more and more safely, both financially and socially. We have got used to being able to pick and choose quite freely in big and small matters. Our circumstances are so good now that we have almost forgotten that our decisions also have consequences and that we cannot opt into or out of all life’s conditions.

For me, it [being Queen] is a responsibility that does not include abdication. It is a task one has been given and taken upon oneself, and one does not relinquish it because it would perhaps be convenient personally to be rid of some of it.

When people say that I may not speak, they forget that I may well think. I may think what I want, like everyone else. I shall just refrain from saying everything I think. That might be something many people should do once in a while.