Isak Dinesen Thinking Quotations

There is hardly any other sphere in which prejudice and superstition of the most horrific kind have been retained so long as in that of women, and just as it must have been an inexpressable relief for humanity when it shook off the burden of religious prejudice and superstition, I think it will be truly glorious when women become real people and have the whole world open before them.

Do you know...what I think is a great pity? It is this: that we have all become such skeptics that we hardly believe what our pious grandmothers told us.

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.

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.

I don't think... one get a flash of happiness once, and never again; it is there deep within you...

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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.