Isak Dinesen Quotes & Sayings

It is often the case with a new idea that when it comes knocking on society's door with modesty and the best premises for its existence, there is a tremendous outcry from inside. — Isak Dinesen

If there were one more thing I could do, it would be to go on safari once again. — Isak Dinesen

In the Ngong Forest I have also seen, on a narrow path through thick growth, in the middle of a very hot day, the Giant Forest Hog, a rare person to meet. — Isak Dinesen

I will not let thee go, except thou bless me. — Isak Dinesen

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

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

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

Who then," she continues, "tells a finer tale than any of us? Silence does. And where does one read a deeper tale than upon the most perfectly printed page of the most precious book? Upon the blank page. When a royal and gallant pen, in the moment of its highest inspiration, has written down its tale with the rarest ink of all -- where, then, may one read a still deeper, sweeter, merrier and more cruel tale than that? Upon the blank page. — Isak Dinesen

Your own self, your personality and existence are reflected within the mind of each of the people whom you meet, ... into a likeness, a caricature of yourself, which still lives on and appears to be, in some way, the truth about you. Even a flattering picture is ... a lie. — Isak Dinesen

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

Real art must always involve some witchcraft. — Isak Dinesen

It is not the visions but the activity which makes you happy, and the joy and glory of the flier is the flight itself. — Isak Dinesen

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

As we grow old we slowly come to believe that everything will turn out badly for us, and that failure is in the nature of things; but then we do not much mind what happens to us one way or the other. — Isak Dinesen

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

It is impossible that a town will not play a part in your life, it does not even make much difference whether you have more good or bad things to say of it, it draws your mind to it, by a mental law of gravitation. — Isak Dinesen

After being told that the Professor "found it possible to believe for a moment in the existence of God," Isak thought, "Has it been possible to God, at Mount Elgon, to believe for a moment in the existence of Professor Landgreen? — Isak Dinesen

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

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

The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept. — Isak Dinesen

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

When we are young the idea of death or failure is intolerable to us; even the possibility of ridicule we cannot bear. But we have also an unconquerable faith in our own stars, and in the impossibility of anything venturing to go against us. As we grow old we slowly come to believe that everything will turn out badly for us, and that failure is in the nature of things, but then we do not much mind what happens to us one way or the other. In this way a balance is obtained. — Isak Dinesen

Where a pack of monkeys had traveled over the road, the smell of them lingered for a long time in the air, a dry and stale, mousy smell. — Isak Dinesen

The true art of the gods is the comic. The comic is a condescension of the divine to the world of man; it is the sublime vision, which cannot be studied, but must ever be celestially granted. In the comic the gods see their own being reflected as in a mirror, and while the tragic poet is bound by strict laws, they will allow the comic artist a freedom as unlimited as their own. — Isak Dinesen

Within our whole universe the story only has the authority to answer that cry of heart of its characters, that one cry of heart of each of them: "Who am I?" — Isak Dinesen

Africa, amongst the continents, will teach it to you: that God and the Devil are one, the majesty coeternal, not two uncreated but one uncreated, and the Natives neither confounded the persons nor divided the substance. — Isak Dinesen

The true aristocracy and the true proletariat of the world are both in understanding with tragedy. To them it is the fundamental principle of God, and the key, - the minor key, - to existence. They differ in this way from the bourgeoisie of all classes, who deny tragedy, who will not tolerate it, and to whom the word of tragedy means in itself unpleasantness. — Isak Dinesen

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

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

There is something strangely determinate and fatal about a single shot in the night. It is as if someone had cried a message to you in one word, and would not repeat it. — Isak Dinesen

Some people have an unconquerable love of riddles. They may have the chance of listening to plain sense, or to such wisdom that explains life; but no, they must go and work their brains over a riddle, just because they do not understand what it means. — Isak Dinesen

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

Tragedy should remain the right of human beings, subject, in their conditions or in their own nature, to the dire law of necessity. To them it is salvation and beatification. — Isak Dinesen

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

People work much in order to secure the future; I gave my mind much work and trouble, trying to secure the past. — Isak Dinesen

And were my faith so strong that it could move mountains, that is the mountain that I would make come to me. — Isak Dinesen

It is little silly to be a caricature of something of which you know very little, and which means very little to you, but to be your own caricature - that is the true carnival! — Isak Dinesen

The lime trees were in bloom. But in the early morning only a faint fragrance drifted through the garden, an airy message, an aromatic echo of the dreams during the short summer night. — Isak Dinesen

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

A giraffe is so much a lady that one refrains from thinking of her legs, but remembers her as floating over the plains in long garb, draperies of morning mist her mirage. — Isak Dinesen

Humanity has made a great error in seizing on a certain moment, no more intrinsically notable than any other moment and has called it Birth. The habit of honoring one single instant of the universal process to the disadvantage of other instants has done more, perhaps, than anything to obfuscate the crystal clearness of the fundamental flux. — Isak Dinesen

It is an alarming experience to be, in your person, representing Christianity to the natives. — Isak Dinesen

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

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

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

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

Some travelers are drawn forward by a goal lying before them in the way iron is drawn to the magnet. Others are driven on by a force lying behind them. In such a way the bowstring makes the arrow fly. — Isak Dinesen

I do not know if you remember the tale of the girl who saves the ship under mutiny by sitting on the powder barrel with her lighted torch and all the time knowing that it is empty? This has seemed to me a charming image of the women of my time. There they were, keeping the world in order by sitting on the mystery of life and knowing themselves that there was no mystery. — Isak Dinesen

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

I don't think ... one get a flash of happiness once, and never again; it is there deep within you ... — Isak Dinesen

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

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

The tropical night has the companionability of a Roman Catholic Cathedral compared to the Protestant Churches of the North, which let you in on business only. Here in the great room everybody comes and goes, this is the place where things are going on. — Isak Dinesen

I have a feeling that wherever I may be in the future, I will be wondering whether there is rain at Ngong. — Isak Dinesen

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

Here and there, in some older houses, old faded daguerreotypes still hang on the walls ... They seem to us to be very simple ... compared with the artistic and skillful portraits made in later days ... Here was a photograph that at one time had been the last word, a very modern portrait ... Today it is just a part of cultural history. The small yellowed surface has acquired depth, an admonishing perspective. We hold in our hand a symbol of the structure and ideology of an epoch. — Isak Dinesen

The present is always unsettled, no one has had time to contemplate it in tranquillity . I was a painter before I was a writer and a painter never wants the subject right under his nose; he wants to stand back and study a landscape with half-closed eyes. — Isak Dinesen

To me, the explanation of life seems to be its melody, its pattern. And I feel in life such an infinite, truly inconceivable fantasy. — Isak Dinesen

I had seen a herd of Elephant travelling through dense native forest ... pacing along as if they had an appointment at the end of the world. — Isak Dinesen

There are times of great beauty on a coffee farm. When the plantation flowered in the beginning of the rains, it was a radiant sight, like a cloud of chalk, in the mist of the drizzling rain. — Isak Dinesen

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

Very old families will sometimes feel upon them the shadow of annihilation. — Isak Dinesen

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

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

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

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

Natives dislike speed, as we dislike noise, it is to them, at the best, hard to bear. They are also on friendly terms with time, and the plan of beguiling or killing it does not come into their heads. In fact the more time you can give them, the happier they are, and if you commission a Kikuyu to hold your horse while you make a visit, you can see by his face that he hopes you will be a long, long time about it. He does not try to pass the time then, but sits down and lives. — Isak Dinesen

In Africa, when you pick up a book worth reading, out of the deadly consignments which good ships are always being made to carry out all the way from Europe, you read it as an author would like his book to be read, praying to God that he may have it in him to go on as beautifully as he has begun. Your mind runs, transported, upon a fresh deep green track. — Isak Dinesen

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

I do not think that I could ever really love a woman who had not, at one time or another, been up on a broomstick. — Isak Dinesen

But by the time that I had nothing left, I myself was the lightest thing of all for fate to get rid of. — Isak Dinesen

You must not think that I feel, in spite of it having ended in such defeat, that my "life has been wasted" here, or that I would exchange it with that of anyone I know. — Isak Dinesen

It is not a bad thing in a tale that you understand only half of it. — Isak Dinesen

The divine art is the story. — Isak Dinesen

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

I have read or been told that in a book of etiquette of the seventeenth century the very first rule forbids you to tell your dreams to other people, since they cannot possibly be of interest to them. — Isak Dinesen

Human talk is a centrifugal function, ever in flight outwards from what is on the talker's mind. — Isak Dinesen

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

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

Therefore does the world love the Swedes, because in the midst of their woes they can draw it all to their bosom and be so galant that they shine a long way away. — Isak Dinesen

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

hornbill was another visitor to the farm, and came there to — Isak Dinesen

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

I do not see eye to eye with the camera. — Isak Dinesen

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

Who tells a finer tale than any of us. Silence does. — Isak Dinesen

I belong to an ancient, idle, wild and useless tribe, perhaps I am even one of the last members of it, who for many thousands of years, in all countries and parts of the world, has, now and again, stayed for a time among the hard-working honest people in real life, and sometimes has thus been fortunate enough to create another sort of reality for them, which in some way or another, has satisfied them. I am a storyteller. — Isak Dinesen

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

Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude. Grace, brothers, makes no conditions and singles out none of us in particular; grace takes us all to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty. See! That which we have chosen is given us, and that which we have refused is, also and at the same time, granted us. Ay, that which we have rejected is poured upon us abundantly. For mercy and truth have met together, and righteousness and bliss have kissed one another! — Isak Dinesen

Be unswervingly and eternally loyal to the story. — Isak Dinesen

I think it will be truly glorious when women become real people and have the whole world open to them. — Isak Dinesen

Now, looking back on my life in Africa, I feel that it might altogether be described as the existence of a person who had come from a rushed and noisy world, into a still country. — Isak Dinesen

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

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. One only feels really free when one can go in whatever direction one pleases over the plains, to get to the river at sundown and pitch one's camp, with the knowledge that one can fall asleep beneath other trees, with another view before one, the next night. — Isak Dinesen

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

A poet's mission is to make others confound fiction and reality in order to render them, for an hour, mysteriously happy. — Isak Dinesen

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

Life and death are like two locked caskets, each of which contains the key to the other. — Isak Dinesen

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

One may take many liberties with God which one cannot take with men. — Isak Dinesen