Quotes by Karen Blixen

About Karen Blixen:

Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke was a Danish author also known by her pen name Isak Dinesen. She also wrote under the pen names Tania Blixen, Osceola and Pierre Andrézel. Blixen wrote works in Danish, French and English.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Là est la différence entre toi et moi. Le monde où tu vis est éclairé par tous les côtés par ta présence en son centre; mais moi il faut que je frotte chaque fois une allumette pour que l'humanité voie ma figure.

Karen Blixen

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

Karen Blixen

The ideas of justice of Europe and Africa are not the same and those of the one world are unbearable to the other. To the African there is but one way of counter-balancing the catastrophes of existence, it shall be done by replacement; he does not lo...

Karen Blixen

It is when one begins to lose the consciousness of freedom, and when the idea of necessity enters the world at all, when there is any hurry or strain anywhere, a letter to be written or a train to catch, when you have got to work, to make the horses ...

Karen Blixen

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

Karen Blixen

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.

Karen Blixen

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. They also know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atm...

Karen Blixen

He conveyed a strange impression of being in safety, and completely secure. He had a courteous little manner with him, and smiled and nodded, as I pointed out the hills and the tall trees to him, as if he were interested in everything, and incapable ...

Karen Blixen

Within this enclosed women's world, so to say, behind the walls and fortifications of it, I felt the presence of a great ideal, without which the garrison would not have carried on so gallantly; the idea of a Millennium when women were to reign supre...

Karen Blixen

The Kikuyu, when left to themselves, do not bury their dead, but leave them above ground for the hyenas and vultures to deal with. The custom had always appealed to me, I thought that it would be pleasant thing to be laid out to the sun and the stars...

Karen Blixen

The barbarian loves his own pride, and hates, or disbelieves in, the pride of others. I will be a civilized being, I will love the pride of my adversaries, of my servants, and my lover; and my house shall be, in all humility, in the wilderness a civi...

Karen Blixen

Love the pride of the conquered nations, and leave them to honour their father and their mother.

Karen Blixen

Come now and let us go and risk our lives unnecessarily. For if they have got any value at all it is this that they gave got none. Frei lebt wer sterben kann.

Karen Blixen

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.

Karen Blixen

The real difference between God and human beings, he thought, was that God cannot stand continuance. No sooner has he created a season of a year, or a time of the day, than he wishes for something quite different, and sweeps it all away. No sooner wa...

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

If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have h...

Karen Blixen

Then Martine said: "So yuo will be poor now all your life, Babette?" Poor?" said Babette. She smiled as if to herself. "No, I shall never be poor. I told you that I am a great artist. A great artist, Mesdames, is never poor.We have something, Mesdame...

Karen Blixen

Dr Sass…maintained that in paradise, until the time of the fall, the whole world was flat, the back-curtain of the Lord, and that it was the devil who invented a third dimension. Thus are the words ‘straight’, ‘square’, and ‘flat’ the w...

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

Author Bio

  • NameKaren Blixen
  • DescriptionDanish writer
  • AliasesKaren von Blixen-Finecke; Karen Christenze Dinesen; Isak Dinesen; Tania Blixen; Osceola; Pierre Andrézel; Karen Christence von Blixen-Finecke; Peter Lawless
  • BornApril 17, 1885
  • DiedSeptember 7, 1962
  • CountryDenmark
  • ProfessionWriter; Autobiographer
  • WorksOut Of Africa; Babette's Feast
  • AwardsDanish Critics Prize For Literature; Tagea Brandt Rejselegat