Quote

Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life, and from this want of recognition come half our domestic troubles.

Freya Stark

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Freya Stark
Age: 100 †
Born: 1893
Born: January 31
Died: 1993
Died: May 9
Author
Essayist
Explorer
Mountaineer
Photographer
Travel Writer
Traveler
Writer
Paris
France
Dame Freya Madeline Stark
Ever
Discipline
Ingredients
Penance
Human
Ordinary
Necessity
Codes
Humans
Deep
Hardly
Ingredient
Come
Trouble
Pleasant
Reflected
Never
Half
Code
Troubles
Life
Upon
Recognition
Adequate
Given
Solitude
Domestic
Spirit
Looked
Indispensable

More quotes by Freya Stark

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I suspect anyone self-satisfied enough to refuse lawful pleasures: we are not sufficiently rich in our separate resources to reject the graces of the universe when offered.
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The greatest of mythologies divided its gods into creators, preservers and destroyers. Tidiness obviously belongs to the second category, which mitigates the terrific impact of the other two.
Freya Stark
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I do like people who have not yet made up their minds about everything, who in fact are still receiving
Freya Stark
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All greatness in style begins, I imagine, with such respect, deep and passionate enough to produce a humility which will not assert itself at the expense even of inanimate things: out of which submissiveness a desire to serve is born, in disinterested accuracy toward the object, whatever it may be.
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On the whole, age comes more gently to those who have some doorway into an abstract world-art, or philosophy, or learning-regions where the years are scarcely noticed and the young and old can meet in a pale truthful light.
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I do think we should be provided with a new body about the age of thirty or so when we have learnt to attend to it with consideration.
Freya Stark
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A pen and a notebook and a reasonable amount of discrimination will change a journey from a mere annual into a perennial, its pleasures and pains renewable at will.
Freya Stark
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The camel is an ugly animal, seen from above. Its shoulders slope formless like a sack, its silly little ears and fluff of bleached curls behind them have a respectable, boarding-house look, like some faded neatness that dresses for propriety but never dressed for love.
Freya Stark
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We were not for underestimating magic - a life-conductor like the sap between the tree-stem and the bark. We know that it keeps dullness out of religion and poetry. It is probable that without it we might die.
Freya Stark
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The unexpectedness of life, waiting round every corner, catches even wise women unawares (...) To avoid corners altogether is, after all, to refuse to live.
Freya Stark
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Pain and fear and hunger are effects of causes which can be foreseen and known: but sorrow is a debt which someone else makes for us.
Freya Stark
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I dislike being an anvil for the hammering out of other people's virtues.
Freya Stark
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What I find trying in a country which you do not understand and where you cannot speak, is that you can never be yourself.
Freya Stark
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Words are the only arteries of thought our poor human body possesses.
Freya Stark
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On the other hand, there is a certain advantage in traveling with someone who has a reputation for shooting rather than being shot: as Keram said, in a self-satisfied way, they might kill me, but they would know that, if I was with him, there would be unpleasantness afterwards.
Freya Stark
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Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.
Freya Stark
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If one were given a single window from which to look upon the changing Eastern world, it should face, I think, the road.
Freya Stark
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... there are few things that can reconcile us fully to our parting with a world of which the longest life can see so little and whose beauties have so extraordinary a variety.
Freya Stark
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Style is something peculiar to one person it expresses one personality and one only it cannot be shared.
Freya Stark
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every word calls up far more of a picture than its actual meaning is supposed to do, and the writer has to deal with all these silent associations as well as with the uttered significance.
Freya Stark