Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Isak Dinesen
Think
Pious
Thinking
Grandmother
Hardly
Pity
Told
Become
Grandmothers
Great
Skeptics
Believe
Skeptic

More quotes by Isak Dinesen

Image
Here I am, where I am supposed to be.
Isak Dinesen
Image
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
Image
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.
Isak Dinesen
Image
And were my faith so strong that it could move mountains, that is the mountain that I would make come to me.
Isak Dinesen
Image
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
Image
I have before seen other countries, in the same manner, give themselves to you when you are about to leave them.
Isak Dinesen
Image
Do you know a cure for me? Why yes, he said, I know a cure for everything. Salt water. Salt water? I asked him. Yes, he said, in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.
Isak Dinesen
Image
I felt that Paris was illuminated by a splendor possessed by no other places.
Isak Dinesen
Image
Love, with very young people, is a heartless business. We drink at that age from thirst, or to get drunk it is only later in life that we occupy ourselves with the individuality of our wine.
Isak Dinesen
Image
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
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
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
We invent the past and remember the future.
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
It is not a bad thing in a tale that you understand only half of it.
Isak Dinesen
Image
Africa, amongst the continents, will teach it to you: that God and the Devil are one, the majesty coeternal, not two uncreated but one uncreated, and the Natives neither confounded the persons nor divided the substance.
Isak Dinesen
Image
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
Image
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
Image
If only I could so live and so serve the world that after me there should never again be birds in cages.
Isak Dinesen