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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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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
Without
Symbols
Great
Visible
Substance
Unhappy
Meaning
Land
Greater
Chooses
Care
Symbol

More quotes by Freya Stark

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The world has become too full of many things, an over furnished room.
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I do dislike people with Moral Aims. Everyone asks me why I learn Arabic, and when I say I just like it, they looked shocked and incredulous.
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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There is generosity in giving, but gentleness in receiving.
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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.
Freya Stark
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Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.
Freya Stark
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Words are the only arteries of thought our poor human body possesses.
Freya Stark
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... I cannot think a civilization worth having that does not encourage and enable its subjects to spend something, not extorted by governments but freely given to keep wretchedness at least from the streets they walk through day by day.
Freya Stark
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One has to resign oneself to being a nuisance if one wants to get anything done.
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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I have met charming people, lots who would be charming if they hadn't got a complex about the British and everyone has pleasant and cheerful manners and I like most of the American voices. On the other hand I don't believe they have any God and their hats are frightful. On balance I prefer the Arabs.
Freya Stark
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There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.
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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Few - very few - of our attainments are so profound that they are valid for always even if they are so, they need adjustment, a straightening here, a loosening there, like an old garment to be fitted to the body.
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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Christmas... is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart.
Freya Stark
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Manners are like zero in arithmetic. They may not be much in themselves, but they are capable of adding a great deal of value to everything else.
Freya Stark
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The art of advertising - untruthfulness combined with repetition.
Freya Stark
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words are but drops pressed out of the lives of those who lived them.
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