179 Quotes by Isak Dinesen

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

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

Perhaps he knew, as I did not, that the Earth was made round so that we would not see too far down the road.

Do you know a cure for me?""Why yes," he said, "I know a cure for everything. Salt water.""Salt water?" I asked him."Yes," he said, "in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.

It is more than their land that you take away from the people, whose Native land you take. It is their past as well, their roots and their identity. If you take away the things that they have been used to see, and will be expecting to see, you may, in a way, as well take their eyes.

Coffee, according to the women of Denmark, is to the body what the word of the Lord is to the soul.

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.

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.

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.