Quotes from Isak Dinesen

I do not think that I could ever really love a woman who had not, at one time or another, been up on a broomstick.

My love was both humble and audacious, like that of a page for his lady.

One must in this lower world love many things to know finally what one loves the best.

It is when people are told their own thoughts that they think they are being insulted.

Truth, like time, is an idea arising from, and dependent upon, human intercourse.

I beg of you, you good people who want to hear stories told: look at this page and recognize the wisdom of my grandmother and of all old story-telling women!

The cure for anything is salt water. Sweat, tears, or the ocean.

One does not travel by plane. One is merely sent, like a parcel.

through the loveliness and power of her dream world she was now, in her old frock and botched shoes, very likely the loveliest, mightiest and most dangerous person on earth

I have read true piety defined as: loving one's destiny unconditionally – and there is something in it. That is to say: I think that in a way this sort of "religiousness" is the condition for real happiness.

Then Martine said: So yuo will be poor now all your life, Babette? Poor? said Babette. She smiled as if to herself. No, I shall never be poor. I told you that I am a great artist. A great artist, Mesdames, is never poor.We have something, Mesdames, of which other people know nothing.

Much which is unworthy in human life might be avoided if people would only accustom themselves to talking in verse

Dr Sass…maintained that in paradise, until the time of the fall, the whole world was flat, the back-curtain of the Lord, and that it was the devil who invented a third dimension. Thus are the words 'straight', 'square', and 'flat' the words of noblemen, but the apple was an orb, and the sin of our first parents, the attempt at getting around God. I myself much prefer the art of painting to sculpture

Para ser feliz, hace falta coraje.

I think these difficult times have helped me to understand better than before how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way that so many things that one goes around worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.

I don't think that... one gets a flash of happiness once, and never again; it is there within you, and it will come as certainly as death.

I think these 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 around worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.

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

There is a particular hapiness in giving a man whom you like very much, good food that you have cooked yourself.

Man and woman are two locked caskets, of which each contains the key to the other.

The divine art is the story.

There are times of great beauty on a coffee farm. When the plantation flowered in the beginning of the rains, it was a radiant sight, like a cloud of chalk, in the mist of the drizzling rain.

That old saying which the peasants call the bachelors' prayer: "I pray thee, good Lord, that I may not be married. But if I am to be married, that I may not be a cuckold. But if I am to be a cuckold, that I may not know. But if I am to know, that I may not mind."

The cure for anything is salt water - tears, sweat, or the sea.