Quote

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

Isak Dinesen

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Isak Dinesen
Person
Story
Tell
Stories
Persons

More quotes by Isak Dinesen

Image
The lime trees were in bloom. But in the early morning only a faint fragrance drifted through the garden, an airy message, an aromatic echo of the dreams during the short summer night.
Isak Dinesen
Image
It is difficult to restrain admirers of Shakespeare once they have begun to speak of him.
Isak Dinesen
Image
We invent the past and remember the future.
Isak Dinesen
Image
What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?
Isak Dinesen
Image
One must in this lower world love many things to know finally what one loves the best.
Isak Dinesen
Image
I arrived at the conviction that we should, more easily and more thoroughly than we now do or ever have done, understand the nature and the laws of the Cosmos if we would from the beginning recognize its originator and upholder as being of the female sex.
Isak Dinesen
Image
What is it which is bought dearly, offered for nothing, and then most often refused?--Experience, old people's experience.
Isak Dinesen
Image
For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide.
Isak Dinesen
Image
To set sail somewhere is more important than life itself.
Isak Dinesen
Image
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.
Isak Dinesen
Image
Tragedy should remain the right of human beings, subject, in their conditions or in their own nature, to the dire law of necessity. To them it is salvation and beatification.
Isak Dinesen
Image
Man and woman are two locked caskets, of which each contains the key to the other.
Isak Dinesen
Image
I felt that Paris was illuminated by a splendor possessed by no other places.
Isak Dinesen
Image
You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.
Isak Dinesen
Image
As we grow old we slowly come to believe that everything will turn out badly for us, and that failure is in the nature of things but then we do not much mind what happens to us one way or the other.
Isak Dinesen
Image
You can't change the past, but you can ruin the present by worrying about the future.
Isak Dinesen
Image
I was young, and by instinct of self-preservation I had to collect my energy on something, if I were not to be whirled away with the dusk on the farm-roads, or the smoke on the plain. I begun in the evenings to write stories, fairy-tales, and romances, that would take my mind a long way off, to other countries and times.
Isak Dinesen
Image
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.
Isak Dinesen
Image
Love, with very young people, is a heartless business. We drink at that age from thirst, or to get drunk it is only later in life that we occupy ourselves with the individuality of our wine.
Isak Dinesen
Image
In those days I had various strong inclinations, for wine, gambling and cockfighting, and the society of gypsies, together with a passion for theological discussion which I had inherited from my father himself-all of which my father thought I had better rid myself of before I married.
Isak Dinesen