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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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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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In one form or another, conscious or unconscious, we have all become propagandists integrity alone can keep us truthful.
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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One is so apt to think of people's affection as a fixed quantity, instead of a sort of moving so with the tide, always going out or coming in but still fundamentally there: and I believe this difficulty in making allowance for the tide is the reason for half the broken friendships.
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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One has to resign oneself to being a nuisance if one wants to get anything done.
Freya Stark
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There is generosity in giving, but gentleness in receiving.
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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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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This is excellence - the following of anything for its own sake and with its own integrity.
Freya Stark
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All our acts have sacramental possibilities.
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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Risk is the salt and sugar of life.
Freya Stark
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The language of salesmanship was no doubt born with the first fashions in fig leaves in the garden of Eden. A strange concept has grown around it: if something is to be sold, inaccuracy is not immoral. Hence the art of advertisement - untruthfulness combined with repetition.
Freya Stark
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The monstrosity of bureaucracy, I thought: always the pint-pot judging the gallon, the scribe's, the door-keeper's world. Always the stupidity of people who feel certain about things they never try to find out. A world that educates people to be ignorant - that is what this world of ours is.
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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There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.
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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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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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