Karen Blixen Quotes

110 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
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
Who then tells a finer tale than any of us? Silence does.

Karen Blixen
I belong to an ancient, idle, wild, and useless tribe... I am a storyteller.

Karen Blixen
Of what happened later in the evening nothing definite can here be stated. None of the guests later on had any clear remembrance of it. They only knew that the rooms had been filled with a heavenly light, as if a number of small halos had blended into one glorious radiance. Taciturn old people received the gift of tongues; ears that for years had been almost deaf were opened to it. Time itself had merged into eternity. Long after midnight the windows of the house shone like gold, and golden song flowed out into the winter air.

Karen Blixen
When later in life they thought of this evening it never occurred to any of them that they might have been exalted by their own merit. They realized that the infinite grace of which General Loewenhielm had spoken had been allotted to them, and they did not even wonder at the fact, for it had been but the fulfillment of an ever-present hope. The vain illusions of this earth had dissolved before their eyes like smoke, and they had seen the universe as it really is. They had been given one hour of the millennium.

Karen Blixen
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.

Karen Blixen
Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Karen Blixen
It is not a bad thing in a tale that you understand only half of it.

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
I first began to tell tales to delight the world and make it wiser...

Karen Blixen
It was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet like the strong and refined essence of a continent... The views were immensely wide — everything that you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequalled nobility.

Karen Blixen
The consolations of the vulgar are bitter in the royal ear. Let physicians and confectioners and servants in the great houses be judged by what they have done, and even by what they have meant to do; the great people themselves are judged by what they are. I have been told that lions, trapped and shut up in cages, grieve from shame more than from hunger.

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

Karen Blixen
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!

Karen Blixen
Human talk is a centrifugal function, ever in flight outwards from what is on the talker's mind.

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

Karen Blixen
Be not afraid of absurdity; do not shrink from the fantastic. Within a dilemma, choose the most unheard-of, the most dangerous solution. Be brave, be brave.

Karen Blixen
I had seen a herd of Buffalo, one hundred and twenty-nine of them, come out of the morning mist under a copper sky, one by one, as if the dark and massive, iron-like animals with the mighty horizontally swung horns were not approaching, but were being created before my eyes and sent out as they were finished.

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

Karen Blixen
I had seen a herd of elephant traveling through dense native forest... pacing along as if they had an appointment at the end of the world.

Karen Blixen