Top 120 Isak Dinesen Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.”

— Isak Dinesen

Featured in: Deep Quotes About Life, Emotional Quotes, Positive Short Quotes, Quotes About the Sea

2. “You can’t change the past, but you can ruin the present by worrying about the future.”

— Isak Dinesen

3. “Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.”

— Isak Dinesen

4. “To be a person is to have a story to tell.”

— Isak Dinesen

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

5. “Difficult times have helped me to understand better than before, how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way, and that so many things that one goes worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.”

— Isak Dinesen

6. “You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.”

— Isak Dinesen

7. “When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.”

— Isak Dinesen

8. “Here I am, where I am supposed to be.”

— Isak Dinesen

9. “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

10. “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.”

— Isak Dinesen

11. “And were my faith so strong that it could move mountains, that is the mountain that I would make come to me.”

— Isak Dinesen

Featured in: Strong Quotes

12. “We must leave our mark on life while we have it in our power.”

— Isak Dinesen

13. “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.”

— Isak Dinesen

14. “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

15. “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.”

— Isak Dinesen

16. “If there were one more thing I could do, it would be to go on safari once again.”

— Isak Dinesen

17. “Where the storyteller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence.”

— Isak Dinesen

18. “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

19. “I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.”

— Isak Dinesen

20. “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

21. “Coffee, according to the women of Denmark, is to the body what the Word of the Lord is to the soul.”

— Isak Dinesen

22. “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.”

— Isak Dinesen

23. “God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road.”

— Isak Dinesen

24. “All suffering is bearable if it is seen as part of a story.”

— Isak Dinesen

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

25. “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

26. “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

27. “To set sail somewhere is more important than life itself.”

— Isak Dinesen

28. “There are many ways to the recognition of truth, and Burgundy is one of them.”

— Isak Dinesen

29. “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

30. “For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people’s way of committing suicide.”

— Isak Dinesen

31. “Real art must always involve some witchcraft.”

— Isak Dinesen

32. “If only I could so live and so serve the world that after me there should never again be birds in cages...”

— Isak Dinesen

33. “A giraffe is so much a lady that one refrains from thinking of her legs, but remembers her as floating over the plains in long garb, draperies of morning mist her mirage.”

— Isak Dinesen

34. “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

35. “All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story.”

— Isak Dinesen

36. “People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue.”

— Isak Dinesen

37. “The best of my nature reveals itself in play, and play is sacred.”

— Isak Dinesen

38. “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

39. “One must in this lower world love many things to know finally what one loves the best...”

— Isak Dinesen

40. “What is it which is bought dearly, offered for nothing, and then most often refused? – Experience, old people’s experience.”

— Isak Dinesen

41. “Where a pack of monkeys had traveled over the road, the smell of them lingered for a long time in the air, a dry and stale, mousy smell.”

— Isak Dinesen

42. “Truth, like time, is an idea arising from, and dependent upon, human intercourse.”

— Isak Dinesen

43. “When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find out that it is the same in all her music.”

— Isak Dinesen

44. “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

45. “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.”

— Isak Dinesen

46. “I have a feeling that wherever I may be in the future, I will be wondering whether there is rain at Ngong.”

— Isak Dinesen

47. “There is something about Safari life that makes you forget all your sorrows.”

— Isak Dinesen

48. “I have been trying for a long time to understand God. Now I have made friends with him. To love him truly you must love change, and you must love a joke, these being the true inclinations of his own heart.”

— Isak Dinesen

49. “Some people have an unconquerable love of riddles. They may have the chance of listening to plain sense, or to such wisdom that explains life; but no, they must go and work their brains over a riddle, just because they do not understand what it means.”

— Isak Dinesen

50. “In the mind and nature of a man a secret is an ugly thing, like a hidden physical defect.”

— Isak Dinesen