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

More quotes by Isak Dinesen

Image
A visitor is a friend, he brings news, good or bad, which is bread to the hungry minds in lonely places. A real friend who comes to the house is a heavenly messenger, who brings the panis angelorum.
Isak Dinesen
Image
I have before seen other countries, in the same manner, give themselves to you when you are about to leave them.
Isak Dinesen
Image
death - a passage outside the range of imagination, but within the range of experience.
Isak Dinesen
Image
And were my faith so strong that it could move mountains, that is the mountain that I would make come to me.
Isak Dinesen
Image
Now, looking back on my life in Africa, I feel that it might altogether be described as the existence of a person who had come from a rushed and noisy world, into a still country.
Isak Dinesen
Image
One must in this lower world love many things to know finally what one loves the best.
Isak Dinesen
Image
While we are young the idea of death or failure is intolerable to us even the possibility of ridicule we cannot bear.
Isak Dinesen
Image
There is something about Safari life that makes you forget all your sorrows
Isak Dinesen
Image
Here I am, where I am supposed to be.
Isak Dinesen
Image
It is little silly to be a caricature of something of which you know very little, and which means very little to you, but to be your own caricature — that is the true carnival!
Isak Dinesen
Image
We invent the past and remember the future.
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
Man and woman are two locked caskets, of which each contains the key to the other.
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
It is not a bad thing in a tale that you understand only half of it.
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 must not think that I feel, in spite of it having ended in such defeat, that my life has been wasted here, or that I would exchange it with that of anyone I know.
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
The present is always unsettled, no one has had time to contemplate it in tranquillity . I was a painter before I was a writer and a painter never wants the subject right under his nose he wants to stand back and study a landscape with half-closed eyes.
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