Isak Dinesen Quotes

There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labelled.

What is the truth? Is it what you experience? Is it what I experience? Or is there some objective truth in between?

If faces were different when lit from above or below -- what was a face? What was anything?

Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. Just as no two people ever see a rainbow in exactly the same place - and yet both most certainly see it, while the person seemingly standing right underneath it does not see it at all - so truth is a question of where one stands, and the direction one is looking in at the time.

Reality is a concept that depends largely upon where you point your face.

Facts do not constitute truth.

Your whole life is nothing but a dream. You live in a fantasy where everything you know about yourself is only true for you. Your truth is not the truth for anyone else.

There is no good or bad without us, there is only perception. There is the event itself and the story we tell ourselves about what it means.

When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship.

What is nonsense, and what is not, then, may be merely a matter of perspective.

One cannot conceive of objectivity without subjectivity.

Perception is a prism, and reality is like shot silk - depends where the light hits.

This world may be only illusion -- but it's the only illusion we've got.

There are no great people. There are only great topics.

There are many levels of truth.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Whatever you say it is, it isn't.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

What you see is what you see.

The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror.

Truth is always a delusion.

Rumi, who is one of the greatest Persian poets, said that the truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell, and broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth.

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

I don't believe there's any such thing as objective reality. It's only reality as we experience it.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.