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

Isak Dinesen Quotes

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

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

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

— Isak Dinesen

The tight place, the dark pit in which I am now lying, of what bird is it the talon? When the design of my life is completed, shall I, shall other people see a stork?

— Isak Dinesen

Women, when they are old enough to have done with the business of being women, and can let loose their strength, must be the most powerful creatures in the whole world.

— Isak Dinesen

If a man can devote himself undisturbed to the work which is on his mind, he can, as far I have observed, completely ignore his surroundings – they disappear for him; he can sit in filth and disorder, draught and cold, and be completely happy. For most women it is insufferable to sit in a room if the color scheme displeases them.

— Isak Dinesen

But the cultivation of race gets nowhere, for even its triumphal progress becomes a vicious circle. It cannot give and cannot receive.

— Isak Dinesen

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

— Isak Dinesen

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

— Isak Dinesen

The tales that white people tell you of their Native servants are conceived in the same spirit. If they had been told that they played no more important part in the lives of the Natives than the Natives played in their own lives, they would have been highly indignant and ill at ease.

— 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

Everything that you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequalled nobility.

— Isak Dinesen

There are many highly intelligent people who have no answer at all in them. A conversation or a correspondence with such persons is nothing but a double monologue – you may stroke them or strike them, you will get no more echo from them than from a block of wood. And how, then, can you yourself go on speaking?

— Isak Dinesen

A man’s center of gravity, the substance of his being, consists in what he has executed and performed in his life; the woman’s, in what she is.

— 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

Is it not a sweet thing to think that, if only you have patience, all that has ever been, will come back to you?

— Isak Dinesen

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

Mercy and truth, my friends, have met together,′ said the General. ‘Righteousness and bliss shall kiss one another.

— Isak Dinesen

And as he passed the boy gave the elder man a short glance and a smile, the haughty and arrogant smile which youth gives to ages.

— Isak Dinesen

There is no joy for a woman in putting a man in his place; it is no humiliation for a man to kneel before a woman. But it is humiliating for the women of a society not to be able to respect their men; it is humiliating for the men of a society not to be able to venerate their women.

— Isak Dinesen
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