Men and women are two locked caskets, of which each contains the key to the other.
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
Topics: Humanity
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.
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
Topics: Evil
The cure for anything is salt water – sweat, tears, or the sea.
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
Topics: Medicine, Happiness, Crying, Water
I don’t think that … one gets a flash of happiness once, and never again; it is there within you, and it will come as certainly as death.
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
Topics: Happiness, Difficulty
All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
Topics: Writing
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 form or another, sweat, tears or the salt sea.
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
Topics: Medicine
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?
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
Topics: Wine
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.
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
Topics: One Step at a Time, Conscience
I do not know if you remember the tale of the girl who saves the ship under mutiny by sitting on the powder barrel with her lighted torch and all the time knowing that it is empty? This has seemed to me a charming image of the women of my time. There they were, keeping the world in order by sitting on the mystery of life, and knowing themselves that there was no mystery.
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
Topics: Women
God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road.
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
Topics: Live-now, Tomorrow, The Future
I think these 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 around worry about are of no importance whatsoever.
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
Topics: Living, Worry
All our failures are ultimately failures in love.
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
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.
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
Topics: Awareness, Humility, Self-Knowledge
To be a person is to have a story to tell.
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
Topics: Storytelling
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…
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
What is it which is bought dearly, offered for nothing, and then most often refused? Experience, old people’s experience.
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Sylvia Plath American Poet, Novelist
Isabel Allende Chilean Novelist
Andre Maurois French Novelist, Biographer
V. S. Naipaul Trinidadian-British Writer
Agatha Christie British Novelist
John Irving American Novelist
John Cheever American Novelist
R. K. Narayan Indian Novelist, Short-story Writer
Louis L’Amour American Novelist
Stephen King American Novelist