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
Never
Half
Code
Troubles
Life
Upon
Recognition
Adequate
Given
Solitude
Domestic
Spirit
Looked
Indispensable
Ever
Discipline
Ingredients
Penance
Human
Ordinary
Necessity
Codes
Humans
Deep
Hardly
Ingredient
Come
Trouble
Pleasant
Reflected

More quotes by 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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Love of learning is a pleasant and universal bond since it deals with what one is and not what one has.
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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A work of art is static and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.
Freya Stark
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I can't get over the exciting beauty of New York - the pencil buildings so high and far that the blueness of the sky floats about them the feeling that one's taxis, and shopping, all go on in the deep canyon-beds of natural erosions rather than in the excrescences of human builders.
Freya Stark
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We love those people who give with humility, or who accept with ease.
Freya Stark
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The perpetual charm of Arabia is that the traveler finds his level there simply as a human being the people's directness, deadly to the sentimental or pedantic, likes the less complicated virtues.
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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The art of advertising - untruthfulness combined with repetition.
Freya Stark
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... freshness trembles beneath the surface of Everyday, a joy perpetual to all who catch its opal lights beneath the dust of habit.
Freya Stark
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Every victory of man over man has in itself a taste of defeat.... There is no essential difference between the various human groups, creatures whose bones and brains and members are the same and every damage we do there is a form of mutilation, as if the fingers of the left hand were to be cut off by the right.
Freya Stark
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... it is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization.
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.
Freya Stark
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It seems to me that the only thing for a pacifist to do is to find a substitute for war: mountains and seafaring are the only ones I know. But it must be something sufficiently serious not to be a game and sufficiently dangerous to exercise those virtues which otherwise get no chance.
Freya Stark
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Few are the giants of the soul who actually feel that the human race is their family circle.
Freya Stark
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The symbol is greater than visible substance. . . . Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.
Freya Stark
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The true call of the desert, of the mountains, or the sea, is their silence - free of the networks of dead speech.
Freya Stark
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The portion we see of human beings is very small: their formats and faces, voices and words.... beyond these, like an immense dark continent, lies all that has made them.
Freya Stark
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Conventions are like coins, an easy way of dealing with the commerce of relations.
Freya Stark
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To think to keep things as they are, is to let them move unpredictably, since nothing but death will still the beat of the heart or keep the universe from its perpetual motion.
Freya Stark