179 Quotes by 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.

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.

It’s an odd feeling-farewell-there is some envy in it. Men go off to be tested for courage and if we’re tested at all, it’s for patience, for doing without, for how well we can endure loneliness.

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.

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.

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!

For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people’s way of committing suicide.

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

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.