Top 120 Isak Dinesen Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “A great artist is never poor.”

— Isak Dinesen

55. “When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them.”

— Isak Dinesen

56. “I do not think that I could ever really love a woman who had not, at one time or another, been up on a broomstick.”

— Isak Dinesen

57. “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

58. “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

59. “We invent the past and remember the future.”

— Isak Dinesen

60. “The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control.”

— Isak Dinesen

61. “While we are young the idea of death or failure is intolerable to us; even the possibility of ridicule we cannot bear.”

— Isak Dinesen

62. “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

63. “I beg of you, you good people who want to hear stories told: look at this page and recognize the wisdom of my grandmother and of all old story-telling women!”

— Isak Dinesen

64. “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

65. “But by the time that I had nothing left, I myself was the lightest thing of all for fate to get rid of.”

— Isak Dinesen

66. “My love was both humble and audacious, like that of a page for his lady...”

— Isak Dinesen

67. “Man reaches the highest point of lovableness at 12 to 17 – to get it back, in a second flowering, at the age of 70 to 90.”

— Isak Dinesen

68. “A poet’s mission is to make others confound fiction and reality in order to render them, for an hour, mysteriously happy.”

— Isak Dinesen

69. “It is when people are told their own thoughts that they think they are being insulted.”

— Isak Dinesen

70. “Women, when they are old enough to have done with the business of being women, and can let loose their strength, must be the most powerful creatures in the whole world.”

— Isak Dinesen

71. “It is impossible that a town will not play a part in your life, it does not even make much difference whether you have more good or bad things to say of it, it draws your mind to it, by a mental law of gravitation.”

— Isak Dinesen

72. “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

73. “To me, the explanation of life seems to be its melody, its pattern. And I feel in life such an infinite, truly inconceivable fantasy.”

— Isak Dinesen

74. “The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept.”

— Isak Dinesen

75. “Truth is for tailors and shoemakers. I, on the contrary, have always held that the Lord has a penchant for masquerades.”

— Isak Dinesen

76. “The divine art is the story.”

— Isak Dinesen

77. “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

78. “I have read true piety defined as: loving one’s destiny unconditionally – and there is something in it. That is to say: I think that in a way this sort of “religiousness” is the condition for real happiness.”

— Isak Dinesen

79. “I think it will be truly glorious when women become real people and have the whole world open to them.”

— Isak Dinesen

80. “Man and woman are two locked caskets, of which each contains the key to the other.”

— Isak Dinesen

81. “It is not a bad thing in a tale that you understand only half of it.”

— Isak Dinesen

82. “The present is always unsettled, no one has had time to contemplate it in tranquillity. I was a painter before I was a writer and a painter never wants the subject right under his nose; he wants to stand back and study a landscape with half-closed eyes.”

— Isak Dinesen

83. “Be unswervingly and eternally loyal to the story.”

— Isak Dinesen

84. “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

85. “It is little silly to be a caricature of something of which you know very little, and which means very little to you, but to be your own caricature – that is the true carnival!”

— Isak Dinesen

86. “One does not travel by plane. One is merely sent, like a parcel.”

— Isak Dinesen

87. “It is difficult to restrain admirers of Shakespeare once they have begun to speak of him.”

— Isak Dinesen

88. “I do not see eye to eye with the camera.”

— Isak Dinesen

89. “There is something strangely determinate and fatal about a single shot in the night. It is as if someone had cried a message to you in one word, and would not repeat it.”

— Isak Dinesen

90. “Human talk is a centrifugal function, ever in flight outwards from what is on the talker’s mind.”

— Isak Dinesen

91. “It is a good thing to be a great sinner. Or should human beings allow Christ to have died on the Cross for the sake of our petty lies and our paltry whorings.”

— Isak Dinesen

92. “There is a particular hapiness in giving a man whom you like very much, good food that you have cooked yourself.”

— Isak Dinesen

93. “Within our whole universe the story only has the authority to answer that cry of heart of its characters, that one cry of heart of each of them: “Who am I?””

— Isak Dinesen

94. “One may take many liberties with God which one cannot take with men.”

— Isak Dinesen

95. “Tragedy should remain the right of human beings, subject, in their conditions or in their own nature, to the dire law of necessity. To them it is salvation and beatification.”

— Isak Dinesen

96. “Who tells a finer tale than any of us. Silence does.”

— Isak Dinesen

97. “There are things which cannot be carried through even with the good will of everybody concerned.”

— Isak Dinesen

98. “I have before seen other countries, in the same manner, give themselves to you when you are about to leave them...”

— Isak Dinesen

99. “In the Ngong Forest I have also seen, on a narrow path through thick growth, in the middle of a very hot day, the Giant Forest Hog, a rare person to meet.”

— Isak Dinesen

100. “I felt that Paris was illuminated by a splendor possessed by no other places.”

— Isak Dinesen