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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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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
Human
Beyond
Continent
Humans
Small
Portion
Made
Dark
Continents
Like
Lying
Portions
Faces
Immense
Voice
Voices
Words
Lies
Formats
Culture
Beings
Format

More quotes by 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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Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.
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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monotony is not to be worshipped as a virtue nor the marriage bed treated as a coffin for security rather than a couch from which to rise refreshed.
Freya Stark
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The world has become too full of many things, an over furnished room.
Freya Stark
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youth looks at its world and age looks through it youth must get busy on problems whose outlines stand single and strenuous before it, while age can, with luck, achieve a cosmic private harmony unsuited for action as a rule.
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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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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... 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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The Persian's mind, like his illuminated manuscripts, does not deal in perspective: two thousand years, if he happens to know anything about them, are as exciting as the day before yesterday.
Freya Stark
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Revolution is man's normal activity, and if he is wise he will grade it slowly so that it may be almost imperceptible - otherwise it will jerk in fits and starts and cause discomfort.
Freya Stark
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... the thwarting of the instinct to love is the root of all sorrow and not sex only but divinity itself is insulted when it is repressed.
Freya Stark
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Accuracy is the basis of style. Words dress our thoughts and should fit and should fit not only in their utterances, but in their implications, their sequences, and their silences, just as in architecture the empty spaces are as important as those that are filled.
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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Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.
Freya Stark
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The artist's business is to take sorrow when it comes. The depth and capacity of his reception is the measure of his art and when he turns his back on his own suffering, he denies the very laws of his being and closes the door on everything that can ever make him great.
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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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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I think that the worst unpleasantness of age is not its final fact ... but the tediousness of preparation, the accumulating number of defeats.
Freya Stark
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Risk is the salt and sugar of life.
Freya Stark