Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Isak Dinesen
Wine
Infinite
Minutely
Upon
Urine
Come
Ingenious
Men
Turning
Think
Machine
Thinking
Red
Machines

More quotes by Isak Dinesen

Image
It is difficult to restrain admirers of Shakespeare once they have begun to speak of him.
Isak Dinesen
Image
We must leave our mark on life while we have it in our power.
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
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
I do not see eye to eye with the camera.
Isak Dinesen
Image
Within our whole universe the story only has the authority to answer that cry of heart of its characters, that one cry of heart of each of them: Who am I?
Isak Dinesen
Image
It is when people are told their own thoughts that they think they are being insulted.
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
The flamingoes are the most delicately colored of all the African birds, pink and red like a flying twig of an oleander bush. They have incredibly long legs and bizarre and recherché curves of their necks and bodies, as if from some exquisite traditional prudery they were making all attitudes and movements in life as difficult as possible.
Isak Dinesen
Image
Real art must always involve some witchcraft.
Isak Dinesen
Image
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.
Isak Dinesen
Image
To be a person is to have a story to tell.
Isak Dinesen
Image
death - a passage outside the range of imagination, but within the range of experience.
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
I felt that Paris was illuminated by a splendor possessed by no other places.
Isak Dinesen
Image
In the Ngong Forest I have also seen, on a narrow path through thick growth, in the middle of a very hot day, the Giant Forest Hog, a rare person to meet.
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
The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept.
Isak Dinesen
Image
Who tells a finer tale than any of us. Silence does.
Isak Dinesen
Image
Africa, amongst the continents, will teach it to you: that God and the Devil are one, the majesty coeternal, not two uncreated but one uncreated, and the Natives neither confounded the persons nor divided the substance.
Isak Dinesen