Karen Blixen quotes

Karen Blixen was a Danish author best known for her memoir "Out of Africa." Her evocative storytelling and vivid descriptions brought the landscapes and cultures of colonial Kenya to life. She is also recognized by her pen name, Isak Dinesen, and is celebrated as one of the great literary voices of the 20th century. Here are 76 of her quotes:

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

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

All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.

Karen Blixen

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

Karen Blixen

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

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.

Karen Blixen

A great artist is never poor.

Karen Blixen

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.

Karen Blixen

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

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.

Karen Blixen

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

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.

Karen Blixen

Real art must always involve some witchcraft.

Karen Blixen

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

Karen Blixen

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?

Karen Blixen

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.

Karen Blixen

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!

Karen Blixen

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

Karen Blixen

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.

Karen Blixen

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

Karen Blixen

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.

Karen Blixen

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

Karen Blixen