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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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Isak Dinesen
Ideas
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Idea
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Intolerable
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Ridicule
Young
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More quotes by 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.
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For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide.
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It is not a bad thing in a tale that you understand only half of it.
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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.
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It is difficult to restrain admirers of Shakespeare once they have begun to speak of him.
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What is it which is bought dearly, offered for nothing, and then most often refused?--Experience, old people's experience.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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I think all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.
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It is more than their land that you take away from the people, whose native land you take. It is their past as well, their roots and their identity. If you take away the things that they have been used to see and will be expecting to see, you may, in a way, as well take their eyes.
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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
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Here I am, where I am supposed to be.
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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The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.
Isak Dinesen
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You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.
Isak Dinesen
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The flamingoes are the most delicately colored of all the African birds, pink and red like a flying twig of an oleander bush. They have incredibly long legs and bizarre and recherché curves of their necks and bodies, as if from some exquisite traditional prudery they were making all attitudes and movements in life as difficult as possible.
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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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No domestic animal can be as still as a wild animal. The civilized people have lost the aptitude of stillness, and must take lessons in silence from the wild before they are accepted by it.
Isak Dinesen