179 Quotes by 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

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.

There are things which cannot be carried through even with the good will of everybody concerned

When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find out that it is the same in all her music.

It is when one begins to lose the consciousness of freedom, and when the idea of necessity enters the world at all, when there is any hurry or strain anywhere, a letter to be written or a train to catch, when you have got to work, to make the horses of the dream gallop, or to make the rifles go off, that the dream is declining, and turning into the nightmare, which belongs to the poorest and most vulgar class of dreams.

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.

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

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.

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