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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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Isak Dinesen
Live
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World
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Birds
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Bird
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More quotes by Isak Dinesen

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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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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.
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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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.
Isak Dinesen
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It is not the visions but the activity which makes you happy, and the joy and glory of the flier is the flight itself.
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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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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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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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
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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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The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.
Isak Dinesen
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A visitor is a friend, he brings news, good or bad, which is bread to the hungry minds in lonely places. A real friend who comes to the house is a heavenly messenger, who brings the panis angelorum.
Isak Dinesen
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Of all the idiots I have met in my life, and the Lord knows they have not been few or little, I think that I have been the biggest.
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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Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me a chance to do my best.
Isak Dinesen
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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
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our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.
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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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
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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