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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

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

More quotes by Isak Dinesen

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Humanity has made a great error in seizing on a certain moment, no more intrinsically notable than any other moment and has called it Birth. The habit of honoring one single instant of the universal process to the disadvantage of other instants has done more, perhaps, than anything to obfuscate the crystal clearness of the fundamental flux.
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The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept.
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During the first quarter of the last century, seaside resorts became the fashion, even in those countries of Northern Europe within the minds of whose people the sea had hitherto held the role of the devil, the cold and voracious hereditary foe of humanity.
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Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me a chance to do my best.
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The Cicada sing an endless song in the long grass, smells run along the earth and falling stars run over the sky, like tears over a cheek. You are the privileged person to whom everything is taken. The Kings of Tarshish shall bring gifts.
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And I had by now become used to the idea of witchcraft, it seemed a reasonable thing, so many things are about, at night, in Africa.
Isak Dinesen
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We invent the past and remember the future.
Isak Dinesen
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The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.
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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 worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.
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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.
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My love was both humble and audacious, like that of a page for his lady.
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When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.
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Do you know...what I think is a great pity? It is this: that we have all become such skeptics that we hardly believe what our pious grandmothers told us.
Isak Dinesen
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I felt that Paris was illuminated by a splendor possessed by no other places.
Isak Dinesen
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I had seen a herd of Elephant travelling through dense native forest ... pacing along as if they had an appointment at the end of the world.
Isak Dinesen
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I have before seen other countries, in the same manner, give themselves to you when you are about to leave them.
Isak Dinesen
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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
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For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide.
Isak Dinesen
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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
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It is when people are told their own thoughts that they think they are being insulted.
Isak Dinesen