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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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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
Boredom
Rise
Refreshed
Treated
Worshipped
Bed
Coffin
Marriage
Coffins
Security
Monotony
Virtue
Couch
Rather
Couches

More quotes by Freya Stark

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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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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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... 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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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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Few are the giants of the soul who actually feel that the human race is their family circle.
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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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 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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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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Once divested of missionary virus, the cult of our gods gives no offence. It would be a peaceful age if this were recognized, and religion, Christian, communist or any other, were to rely on practice and not on conversion for her growth.
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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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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... 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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... 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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This is excellence - the following of anything for its own sake and with its own integrity.
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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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 dislike being an anvil for the hammering out of other people's virtues.
Freya Stark
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The beckoning counts, and not the clicking of the latch behind you.
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