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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.

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
Art
Regions
Doorway
Light
Abstract
Doorways
Young
Meet
Gently
Whole
Quiet
Scarcely
Years
Learning
Truthful
World
Philosophy
Noticed
Age
Comes
Pale

More quotes by 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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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
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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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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 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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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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... 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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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
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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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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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One has to resign oneself to being a nuisance if one wants to get anything done.
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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The world has become too full of many things, an over furnished room.
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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This is excellence - the following of anything for its own sake and with its own integrity.
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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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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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 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