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What is it which is bought dearly, offered for nothing, and then most often refused?--Experience, old people's experience.

Isak Dinesen

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Isak Dinesen
Offered
Bought
Often
Experience
Nothing
People
Dearly
Refused

More quotes by 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.
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There is something about Safari life that makes you forget all your sorrows
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For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people's way of committing suicide.
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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.
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death - a passage outside the range of imagination, but within the range of experience.
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You can't change the past, but you can ruin the present by worrying about the future.
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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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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?
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I don't think... one get a flash of happiness once, and never again it is there deep within you.
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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.
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It's an odd feeling-farewell-there is some envy in it. Men go off to be tested for courage and if we're tested at all, it's for patience, for doing without, for how well we can endure loneliness.
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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?
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To be a person is to have a story to tell.
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One must in this lower world love many things to know finally what one loves the best.
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Who tells a finer tale than any of us. Silence does.
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We invent the past and remember the future.
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.
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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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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.
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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