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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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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
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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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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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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.
Isak Dinesen
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One must in this lower world love many things to know finally what one loves the best.
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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It is difficult to restrain admirers of Shakespeare once they have begun to speak of him.
Isak Dinesen
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through the loveliness and power of her dream world she was now, in her old frock and botched shoes, very likely the loveliest, mightiest and most dangerous person on earth
Isak Dinesen
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I think it will be truly glorious when women become real people and have the whole world open to them.
Isak Dinesen
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To set sail somewhere is more important than life itself.
Isak Dinesen
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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
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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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And were my faith so strong that it could move mountains, that is the mountain that I would make come to me.
Isak Dinesen
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One does not travel by plane. One is merely sent, like a parcel.
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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The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept.
Isak Dinesen
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If only I could so live and so serve the world that after me there should never again be birds in cages.
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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It is not a bad thing in a tale that you understand only half of it.
Isak Dinesen