Karen von Blixen-Finecke (April 17, 1885 - September 7, 1962), née Karen Christenze Dinesen, was a Danish author also known by her pen name Isak Dinesen. Blixen is best known for Out of Africa, her account of living in Kenya, and Babette's Feast, both adapted into Academy Award-winning motion pictures. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.
A great artist is never poor.
I think these difficult times have helped me to realize how infinitely rich and beautiful life is. And that so many things one worries about are of no importance whatsoever.
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?
Perhaps he knew, as I did not, that the Earth was made round so that we would not see too far down the road.
All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.
The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept.
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.
Who tells a finer tale than any of us. Silence does.
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.
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.
I think it will be truly glorious when women become real people and have the whole world open to them.
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.
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.
Real art must always involve some witchcraft.
The best of my nature reveals itself in play, and play is sacred.
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.
I have been told that lions, trapped and shut up in cages, grieve from shame more than from hunger.
People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not.
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.
Human talk is a centrifugal function, ever in flight outwards from what is on the talker's mind.
Man and woman are two locked caskets, of which each contains the key to the other.
It never has happened, and it never will happen, and that is why it is told.
Categories: Isak Dinesen, Quotes of the day
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