Isak Dinesen Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  Isak Dinesen

  Beach, Encouragement, Ocean

  183 Copy quote

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

  Isak Dinesen

  Wise, Past, Worry

  111 Copy quote

• 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

  79 Copy quote

• 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

  As quoted in obituaries, September 7, 1962.

  50 Copy quote

• I arrived at the conviction that we should, more easily and more thoroughly than we now do or ever have done, understand the nature and the laws of the Cosmos if we would from the beginning recognize its originator and upholder as being of the female sex.

  Isak Dinesen

  God, Sex, Law

  Isak Dinesen (2011). “Last Tales”, p.67, Vintage

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  45 Copy quote

• Where the storyteller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence.

  Isak Dinesen

  Voice, Silence, Faithful

  Isak Dinesen (2011). “Last Tales”, p.104, Vintage

  5 Copy quote

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

  Isak Dinesen

  Here I Am, Supposed To Be

  27 Copy quote

• I think all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.

  Isak Dinesen

  Suffering, Stories, Bearable

  Interview with Bent Mohn in The New York Times Book Review, November 3, 1957.

  27 Copy quote

• To be a person is to have a story to tell.

  Isak Dinesen

  Stories, Public Speaking, Storytelling

  16 Copy quote

• 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

  31 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• If only I could so live and so serve the world that after me there should never again be birds in cages.

  Isak Dinesen

  Animal, Bird, Cages

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  6 Copy quote

• Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.

  Isak Dinesen

  Writing, Despair, Littles

  13 Copy quote

• 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

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

  5 Copy quote

• 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.

  27 Copy quote

• 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

  30 Copy quote

• 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

  15 Copy quote

• You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.

  Isak Dinesen

  Travel, Adventure, Alive

  17 Copy quote

• There was a place in the Hills, on the first ridge in the Game Reserve, that I myself at the time when I thought that I was to live and die in Africa, had pointed out to Denys as my future burial-place. In the evening, while we sat and looked at the hills from my house, he remarked that then he would like to be buried there himself as well. Since then, sometimes when we drove out in the hills, Denys had said: "Let us drive as far as our graves.

  Isak Dinesen

  Games, House, Firsts

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

  8 Copy quote

• To set sail somewhere is more important than life itself.

  Isak Dinesen

  Important, Sail

  4 Copy quote

• "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

  "The Deluge at Norderney" by Isak Dinesen, 1934.

  28 Copy quote

• There are many ways to the recognition of truth, and Burgundy is one of them.

  Isak Dinesen

  Wine, Way, Recognition

  Isak Dinesen (2011). “Seven Gothic Tales”, p.100, Vintage

  50 Copy quote

• The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control.

  Isak Dinesen

  Dream, Lying, Sides

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

  6 Copy quote

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