Isak Dinesen

The divine art is the story.

— Isak Dinesen

Your own self, your personality and existence are reflected within the mind of each of the people whom you meet, ... into…

— Isak Dinesen

A great artist is never poor.

— Isak Dinesen

To be a person is to have a story to tell.

— Isak Dinesen

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

— Isak Dinesen

When we are young the idea of death or failure is intolerable to us; even the possibility of ridicule we cannot bear.…

— Isak Dinesen

Here and there, in some older houses, old faded daguerreotypes still hang on the walls... They seem to us to be very…

— Isak Dinesen

“It is more than their land that you take away from the people, whose Native land you take. It is their past…

— Isak Dinesen

There was a place in the Hills, on the first ridge in the Game Reserve, that I myself at the time when…

— Isak Dinesen

If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows…

— Isak Dinesen

People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds…

— Isak Dinesen

All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story.

— Isak Dinesen

the true art of the gods is the comic. The comic is a condescension of the divine to the world of man;…

— Isak Dinesen

“Dr Sass…maintained that in paradise, until the time of the fall, the whole world was flat, the back-curtain of the Lord, and…

— Isak Dinesen

When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every…

— Isak Dinesen

I have read true piety defined as: loving one’s destiny unconditionally – and there is something in it. That is to say:…

— Isak Dinesen

The consolations of the vulgar are bitter in the royal ear. Let physicians and confectioners and servants in the great houses be…

— Isak Dinesen

We must leave our mark on life while we have it in our power.

— Isak Dinesen

The flamingoes are the most delicately colored of all the African birds, pink and red like a flying twig of an oleander…

— Isak Dinesen

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

— Isak Dinesen

There are times of great beauty on a coffee farm. When the plantation flowered in the beginning of the rains, it was…

— Isak Dinesen

There are many ways to the recognition of truth, and Burgundy is one of them.

— Isak Dinesen

I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles…

— Isak Dinesen

I have been trying for a long time to understand God. Now I have made friends with him. To love him truly…

— Isak Dinesen

We invent the past and remember the future.

— Isak Dinesen