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You can't change the past, but you can ruin the present by worrying about the future.

Isak Dinesen

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Isak Dinesen
Present
Worry
Wise
Future
Past
Change
Worrying
Ruin
Ruins

More quotes by Isak Dinesen

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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.
Isak Dinesen
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I do not see eye to eye with the camera.
Isak Dinesen
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Be not afraid of absurdity do not shrink from the fantastic. Within a dilemma, choose the most unheard-of, the most dangerous solution. Be brave, be brave.
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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
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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
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My love was both humble and audacious, like that of a page for his lady.
Isak Dinesen
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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
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death - a passage outside the range of imagination, but within the range of experience.
Isak Dinesen
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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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God made the world, My Lord, and looked at it, and saw that it was good. Yes. But what if the world had looked back at him, to see whether he was good or not?
Isak Dinesen
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I think all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.
Isak Dinesen
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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
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It is often the case with a new idea that when it comes knocking on society's door with modesty and the best premises for its existence, there is a tremendous outcry from inside.
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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While we are young the idea of death or failure is intolerable to us even the possibility of ridicule we cannot bear.
Isak Dinesen
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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
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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.
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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Real art must always involve some witchcraft.
Isak Dinesen
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It is difficult to restrain admirers of Shakespeare once they have begun to speak of him.
Isak Dinesen