Karen Blixen Quotes

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.

Still, we often talked on the farm of the Safaris that we had been on. Camping places fix themselves in your mind as if you had spent long periods of your life in them. You will remember a curve of your wagon track in the grass of the plain, like the features of a friend.

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.

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

White people, who for a long time live alone with Natives, get into the habit of saying what they mean, because they have no reason or opportunity for dissimulation, and when they meet again their conversation keeps the Native tone.

The cure for anything is salt water — sweat, tears, or the salt sea.

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 civilized place.

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 supreme in the world. The old mother at such times would take on a new shape, and sit enthroned as a massive dark symbol of that mighty female deity who had existed in old ages, before the time of the prophet's God. Of her they never lost sight, but they were, before all, practical people with an eye on the needs of the moment and with infinite readiness of resource.

If there were one more thing I could do, it would be to go on safari again.

Where, My Lord, is music bred — upon the instrument or within the ear that listens? The loveliness of woman is created in the eye of man.

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?

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!

No domestic animal can be as still as a wild animal. The civilized people have lost the aptitude of stillness, and must take lessons in silence from the wild before they are accepted by it.

The Cicada sing an endless song in the long grass, smells run along the earth and falling stars run over the sky, like tears over a cheek. You are the privileged person to whom everything is taken. The Kings of Tarshish shall bring gifts.

"A história de um galante

"Sempre pensei que é uma injustiça para a mulher não ter estado nunca sozinha no mundo. Adão pôde, por um tempo, muito ou pouco, caminhar sobre uma terra jovem e serena, entre os animais, na posse inteira da sua alma, e a maioria dos homens nasce ainda com a memória desse tempo. Mas a pobre Eva, essa, já o encontrou a ele, reclamando-a para si, no momento em que abriu os olhos para o mundo. E isto nunca perdoou a mulher ao Criador: ela sente-se com o direito a reaver para si própria esse tempo no Paraíso. Só que, para sua pouca sorte, ao perseguir-se um tempo já passado, sempre o apanhamos de raspão e pelo avesso.