Isak Dinesen Quotes

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• The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.

  Isak Dinesen

  Beach, Encouragement, Ocean

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• Nobody has seen the trekking birds take their way towards such warmer spheres as do not exist, or rivers break their course through rocks and plains to run into an ocean which is not to be found. For God does not create a longing or a hope without having a fulfilling reality ready for them. But our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.

  Isak Dinesen

  Running, Ocean, Blessed

  Isak Dinesen (2011). “Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard”, p.10, Vintage

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• 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

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• The real difference between God and human beings is that God cannot stand continence. No sooner has he created a season of a year, or a time of day, than he wishes for something quite different and sweeps it all away. And human beings cleave to the existing state of things. All their lives they are striving to hold the moment fast, and are up against a force majeure. Their art itself is nothing but the attempt to catch by all means the one particular moment, one mood, one light, the momentary beauty of one woman or one flower, and make it everlasting.

  Isak Dinesen

  Art, Real, Flower

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

  Isak Dinesen

  Wise, Past, Worry

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• 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

  Isak Dinesen (1987). “Out of Africa”, Crown Pub

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• One must in this lower world love many things to know finally what one loves the best.

  Isak Dinesen

  World Love, World, One Love

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• 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

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• There is something about safari life that makes you forget all your sorrows and feel as if you had drunk half a bottle of champagne — bubbling over with heartfelt gratitude for being alive.

  Isak Dinesen

  Gratitude, Drunk, Heartfelt

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• I have been trying for a long time to understand God. Now I have made friends with him. To love him truly you must love change, and you must love a joke, these being the true inclinations of his own heart.

  Isak Dinesen

  Heart, Long, Trying

  Isak Dinesen (2011). “Seven Gothic Tales”, p.355, Vintage

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• 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

  "Fictional character: Karen Blixen". "Out of Africa", www.imdb.com. 1985.

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• Here I am, where I am supposed to be.

  Isak Dinesen

  Here I Am, Supposed To Be

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• 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

  Isak Dinesen (2011). “Seven Gothic Tales”, p.115, Vintage

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• 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

  Encouraging, Perseverance, Time

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• 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

  Isak Dinesen (2011). “Seven Gothic Tales”, p.55, Vintage

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• People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue.

  Isak Dinesen

  Dream, Sleep, Heart

  Isak Dinesen (1938). “Out of Africa”

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• 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

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• 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, Later In Life, People

  Isak Dinesen (2011). “Seven Gothic Tales”, p.83, Vintage

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• It is a sad hardship and slavery to people who live in towns, that in their movements they know of one dimension only; they walk along the line as if they were led on a string. The transition from the line to the plane into the two dimensions, when you wander across a field or through a wood, is a splendid liberation to the slaves, like the French Revolution. But in the air you are taken into the full freedom of the three dimensions; after long ages of exile and dreams the homesick heart throws itself into the arms of space.

  Isak Dinesen

  Dream, Taken, Heart

  Isak Dinesen (1938). “Out of Africa”

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• The consolations of the vulgar are bitter in the royal ear. Let physicians and confectioners and servants in the great houses be judged by what they have done, and even by what they have meant to do; the great people themselves are judged by what they are. I have been told that lions, trapped and shut up in cages, grieve from shame more than from hunger.

  Isak Dinesen

  Grieving, People, House

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• One does not travel by plane. One is merely sent, like a parcel.

  Isak Dinesen

  Doe, Planes, Parcel

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• I had seen a herd of Buffalo, one hundred and twenty-nine of them, come out of the morning mist under a copper sky, one by one, as if the dark and massive, iron-like animals with the mighty horizontally swung horns were not approaching, but were being created before my eyes and sent out as they were finished.

  Isak Dinesen

  Morning, Eye, Dark

  Isak Dinesen (1938). “Out of Africa”

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• 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

  Isak Dinesen (2011). “Seven Gothic Tales”, p.245, Vintage

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• 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

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• What is life when you come to think upon it, but a most excellent, accurately set, infinitely complicated machine for turning fat playful puppies into old mangy blind dogs, and proud war horses into skinny nags, and succulent young boys, to whom the world holds great delights and terrors, into old weak men, with running eyes, who drink ground rhino-horn?

  Isak Dinesen

  Running, Dog, Horse

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