You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.
Isak DinesenRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote highlights the difference in stillness between wild and domestic animals, suggesting that civilization has lost this quality and must learn from nature.
Isak Dinesen's quote reflects on the intrinsic stillness found in wild animals, which contrasts with the restlessness often observed in domestic ones. It suggests that modern, civilized society has become disconnected from the quietude of nature, implying that to reconnect with this stillness and wisdom, people must learn from the wild's innate tranquility and silence.
Themes
StillnessWildlifeSilenceCivilizationNature
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about mindfulness and connecting with nature.
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
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.
Isak DinesenRead
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