"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."

"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."
From "Out of Africa"

"It was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet like the strong and refined essence of a continent...The views were immensely wide - everything that you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequalled nobility."
From "Out of Africa"

"Of all the idiots I have met in my life, and they have not been few or little, I think that I have been the biggest."

"The giraffe, in their queer, inimitable, vegetative gracefulness...a family of rare, long-stemmed, speckled gigantic flowers slowly advancing.
From "Out of Africa"

"The true aristocracy and the true proletariat of the world are both in understanding with tragedy. To them it is the fundamental principle of God, and the key, the minor key, to existence. They differ in this way from the bourgeoisie of all classes, who deny tragedy, who will not tolerate it, and to whom the word tragedy means in itself unpleasantness."
From "Out of Africa"

"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?
From "Seven Gothic Tales" - 'The Dreamers'

"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."
From "The Diver"

"It never has happened, and it never will happen, and that is why it is told."
From "The Immortal Story"

"Human talk is a centrifugal function, ever in flight outwards from what is on the talker's mind."
From "The invincible slave-owners"

"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."
From "Sorrow-Acre"

"People who dream ... know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom ... the freedom of the artist."
From "Out of Africa"

"Real art must always involve some witchcraft."
From "Letters from Africa"

"Straight is the line of duty. Curved is the line of beauty."
From "The Monkey"

"The will to sacrifice ... was the disdain of death."
From "Daguerreotypes"

"So sad did it seem that I remembered the saying of the hero in a book that I had read as a child: 'I have conquered them all, but I am standing amongst graves.'"
From "Out of Africa"

"The best of my nature reveals itself in play, and play is sacred."
From "Modern Marriage"

"To be your own caricature - that is the true carnival!"
From "Carnival"