Isak Dinesen Quotes

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?

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

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.

I don't think that... one gets a flash of happiness once and never again it is there within you and it will come as certainly as death.

I think these difficult times have helped me to understand better than before how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way that so many things that one goes around worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.

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

After a little while you became aware of how still it was out here. Now, looking back on my life in Africa, I feel like it might altogether be described as the existence of a person who had come from a rushed and noisy world, into a still country.

I think these 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 around worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.

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

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.

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.

The cure for anything is salt water. Sweat, tears, or the ocean.

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

I don't think that ... one gets a flash of happiness once and never again it is there within you and it will come as certainly as death....