Karen Blixen quotes

The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea. (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. View quote
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. View quote
Karen Blixen
All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them. View quote
Karen Blixen
God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Karen Blixen
A great artist is never poor. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Karen Blixen
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)
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Karen Blixen
Real art must always involve some witchcraft. View quote
Karen Blixen
My love was both humble and audacious, like that of a page for his lady... View quote
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? View quote
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. View quote
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! View quote
Karen Blixen
The best of my nature reveals itself in play, and play is sacred. View quote
Karen Blixen
Nobody has seen the trekking birds take their way towards such warmer spheres as do not exist, or rivers break their course through rocks and plains to run into an ocean which is not to be found. For God does not create a longing or a hope without having a fulfilling reality ready for them. But our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home. (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. View quote
Karen Blixen
I have a feeling that wherever I may be in the future, I will be wondering whether there is rain at Ngong. View quote
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. View quote
Karen Blixen
Man and woman are two locked caskets, of which each contains the key to the other. View quote
Karen Blixen