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

More quotes by 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
You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.
Isak Dinesen
Image
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.
Isak Dinesen
Image
One must in this lower world love many things to know finally what one loves the best.
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
My love was both humble and audacious, like that of a page for his lady.
Isak Dinesen
Image
We must leave our mark on life while we have it in our power.
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
There is something about safari life that makes you forget all your sorrows and feel as if you had drunk half a bottle of champagne — bubbling over with heartfelt gratitude for being alive.
Isak Dinesen
Image
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.
Isak Dinesen
Image
One does not travel by plane. One is merely sent, like a parcel.
Isak Dinesen
Image
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.
Isak Dinesen
Image
our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.
Isak Dinesen
Image
I don't think... one get a flash of happiness once, and never again it is there deep within you.
Isak Dinesen
Image
Where a pack of monkeys had traveled over the road, the smell of them lingered for a long time in the air, a dry and stale, mousy smell.
Isak Dinesen
Image
When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find out that it is the same in all her music.
Isak Dinesen
Image
For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide.
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
Image
What is it which is bought dearly, offered for nothing, and then most often refused?--Experience, old people's experience.
Isak Dinesen
Image
There are times of great beauty on a coffee farm. When the plantation flowered in the beginning of the rains, it was a radiant sight, like a cloud of chalk, in the mist of the drizzling rain.
Isak Dinesen