You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.
Isak DinesenRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects the beauty of nature and the feelings of loss and privilege in life.
Isak Dinesen's quote captures the essence of nature as a continuous, vibrant force, using imagery of cicadas and falling stars to evoke the sensory richness of the world. It contrasts these natural wonders with the experience of loss, suggesting that even in moments of grief or deprivation, one can still find beauty and privilege in existence.
Themes
NatureBeautyLossPrivilegeLifeEmotion
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech about appreciating the beauty of life even in tough times.
More from Isak Dinesen
All quotes →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.
Isak DinesenRead
I was young, and by instinct of self-preservation I had to collect my energy on something, if I were not to be whirled away with the dusk on the farm-roads, or the smoke on the plain. I begun in the evenings to write stories, fairy-tales, and romances, that would take my mind a long way off, to other countries and times.
Isak DinesenRead
The lime trees were in bloom. But in the early morning only a faint fragrance drifted through the garden, an airy message, an aromatic echo of the dreams during the short summer night.
Isak DinesenRead
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.
Isak DinesenRead
through the loveliness and power of her dream world she was now, in her old frock and botched shoes, very likely the loveliest, mightiest and most dangerous person on earth
Isak DinesenRead
Similar quotes
You see that pale, blue dot? That's us. Everything that has ever happened in all of human history, has happened on that pixel. All the triumphs and all the tragedies, all the wars all the famines, all the major advances... it's our only home. And that is what is at stake, our ability to live on planet Earth, to have a future as a civilization. I believe this is a moral issue, it is your time to seize this issue, it is our time to rise again to secure our future.
Al GoreRead
And gentle winds and waters near, make music to the lonely ear.
Lord ByronRead
It enclosed us in its laceries as we watched the moon spill across the Atlantic like wine from an overturned glass. With the light all around us, we felt secret in that moon-infused water like pearls forming in the soft tissues of oysters.
Pat ConroyRead
A fish is more valuable swimming in the sea maintaining the integrity of oceanic eco-systems than it is on anyone's plate.
Paul WatsonRead
One thing is made of another, and nature allows no new creation except at the price of death.
LucretiusRead
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd, I stand and look at them long and long.
Walt WhitmanRead