Isak Dinesen famous quotes

Difficult times have helped me to understand better than before, how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way, and that so many things that one goes worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Inspirational #Life #Beautiful

God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road.
-- Isak Dinesen

#World #Able #Live In The Present

Coffee, according to the women of Denmark, is to the body what the Word of the Lord is to the soul.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Coffee #Soul #Body

The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Encouragement #Beach #Ocean

Up in this air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Morning #Heart #Air

All suffering is bearable if it is seen as part of a story.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Suffering #Stories #Bearable

You can't change the past, but you can ruin the present by worrying about the future.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Past #Worry #Ruins

I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Feet #Hills

Man and woman are two locked caskets, of which each contains the key to the other.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Men #Keys #Two

Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Writing #Despair #Littles

To be a person is to have a story to tell.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Stories #Public Speaking #Storytelling

When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Perseverance #Time #Women

Do you know a cure for me?" Why yes," he said, "I know a cure for everything. Salt water." Salt water?" I asked him. Yes," he said, "in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Sea #Sweat #Water

What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?
-- Isak Dinesen

#Wine #Thinking #Men

Love, with very young people, is a heartless business. We drink at that age from thirst, or to get drunk; it is only later in life that we occupy ourselves with the individuality of our wine.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Wine #People #Drunk

Truth is for tailors and shoemakers. I, on the contrary, have always held that the Lord has a penchant for masquerades.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Tailors #Truth Is #Lord

Be not afraid of absurdity; do not shrink from the fantastic.  Within a dilemma, choose the most unheard-of, the most dangerous solution.  Be brave, be brave.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Brave #Fantastic #Dangerous

I belong to an ancient, idle, wild, and useless tribe... I am a storyteller.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Useless #Tribes #Ancient

It is a good thing to be a great sinner. Or should human beings allow Christ to have died on the Cross for the sake of our petty lies and our paltry whorings
-- Isak Dinesen

#Lying #Sake #Christ

I felt that Paris was illuminated by a splendor possessed by no other places.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Paris #Splendor

In those days I had various strong inclinations, for wine, gambling and cockfighting, and the society of gypsies, together with a passion for theological discussion which I had inherited from my father himself-all of which my father thought I had better rid myself of before I married.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Strong #Father #Passion

The air was cold to the lungs, the long grass dripping wet, and the herbs on it gave out their spiced astringent scent. In a little while on all sides the Cicada would begin to sing. The grass was me , and the air, the distant invisible mountains were me, the tired oxen were me. I breathed with the slight night-wind in the thorn trees.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Tired #Night #Air

We must leave our mark on life while we have it in our power.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Mark

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me a chance to do my best.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Heart #Artist #Long

Man reaches the highest point of lovableness at 12 to 17 - to get it back, in a second flowering, at the age of 70 to 90
-- Isak Dinesen

#Teenage #Men #Flowering

I beg of you, you good people who want to hear stories told: look at this page and recognize the wisdom of my grandmother and of all old story-telling women!
-- Isak Dinesen

#Grandmother #People #Want

It is not the visions but the activity which makes you happy, and the joy and glory of the flier is the flight itself. . . Every time I have gone up in an aeroplane and looked down have realized I was free of the ground, I have had the consciousness of a new discovery. "I see:" I have thought, "This was the idea. And now I understand everything."
-- Isak Dinesen

#Discovery #Ideas #Joy

I don't believe in evil; I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Believe #Evil #Ants

There are things which cannot be carried through even with the good will of everybody concerned
-- Isak Dinesen

#Concerned

When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find out that it is the same in all her music.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Caught #Rhythm

God made the world, My Lord, and looked at it, and saw that it was good. Yes. But what if the world had looked back at him, to see whether he was good or not?
-- Isak Dinesen

#What If #World #Saws

During the first quarter of the last century, seaside resorts became the fashion, even in those countries of Northern Europe within the minds of whose people the sea had hitherto held the role of the devil, the cold and voracious hereditary foe of humanity.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Country #Fashion #Book

The best of my nature reveals itself in play, and play is sacred.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Play #Sacred

Real art must always involve some witchcraft.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Art #Real #Witchcraft

There is hardly any other sphere in which prejudice and superstition of the most horrific kind have been retained so long as in that of women, and just as it must have been an inexpressable relief for humanity when it shook off the burden of religious prejudice and superstition, I think it will be truly glorious when women become real people and have the whole world open before them.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Religious #Real #Thinking

For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Suicide #Dream #People

We invent the past and remember the future.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Past #Imagination #Remember

What is it which is bought dearly, offered for nothing, and then most often refused?--Experience, old people's experience.
-- Isak Dinesen

#People #Experience #Old People

It is difficult to restrain admirers of Shakespeare once they have begun to speak of him.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Speak #Admirer #Difficult

While we are young the idea of death or failure is intolerable to us; even the possibility of ridicule we cannot bear.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Failure #Ideas #Bears

In the mind and nature of a man a secret is an ugly thing, like a hidden physical defect.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Men #Secret #Mind

Do you know...what I think is a great pity? It is this: that we have all become such skeptics that we hardly believe what our pious grandmothers told us.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Believe #Grandmother #Thinking

It is when people are told their own thoughts that they think they are being insulted.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Truth #Thinking #People

I have before seen other countries, in the same manner, give themselves to you when you are about to leave them ...
-- Isak Dinesen

#Country #Giving

My love was both humble and audacious, like that of a page for his lady...
-- Isak Dinesen

#Humble #Pages #Audacious

And I had by now become used to the idea of witchcraft, it seemed a reasonable thing, so many things are about, at night, in Africa.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Night #Ideas #Used

The Cicada sing an endless song in the long grass, smells run along the earth and falling stars run over the sky, like tears over a cheek. You are the privileged person to whom everything is taken. The Kings of Tarshish shall bring gifts.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Running #Song #Stars

Truth, like time, is an idea arising from, and dependent upon, human intercourse.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Truth #Ideas #Intercourse

When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Going Away #Looks #Strange

A visitor is a friend, he brings news, good or bad, which is bread to the hungry minds in lonely places. A real friend who comes to the house is a heavenly messenger, who brings the panis angelorum.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Lonely #Real #House

I have read true piety defined as: loving one’s destiny unconditionally – and there is something in it. That is to say: I think that in a way this sort of “religiousness” is the condition for real happiness.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Real #Destiny #Thinking

One does not travel by plane. One is merely sent, like a parcel.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Doe #Planes #Parcel

through the loveliness and power of her dream world she was now, in her old frock and botched shoes, very likely the loveliest, mightiest and most dangerous person on earth
-- Isak Dinesen

#Dream #Shoes #World

Of all the idiots I have met in my life, and the Lord knows they have not been few or little, I think that I have been the biggest.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Thinking #Littles #Idiot

I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Writing #Character #Feelings

If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?
-- Isak Dinesen

#Song #Children #Lying

It's an odd feeling-farewell-there is some envy in it. Men go off to be tested for courage and if we're tested at all, it's for patience, for doing without, for how well we can endure loneliness.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Loneliness #Farewell #Men

our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.
-- Isak Dinesen

#Blessed #Home #Longing