Quote

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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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
World
Certain
Pot
Gallon
People
Find
Educate
Pint
Feel
Stupidity
Monstrosity
Feels
Ignorant
Pints
Trying
Door
Gallons
Always
Judging
Keeper
Scribe
Things
Doors
Keepers
Educates
Never
Thought
Bureaucracy
Scribes

More quotes by 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 greatest of mythologies divided its gods into creators, preservers and destroyers. Tidiness obviously belongs to the second category, which mitigates the terrific impact of the other two.
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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Time is the sea in which men grow, are born, or die.
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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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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On the other hand, there is a certain advantage in traveling with someone who has a reputation for shooting rather than being shot: as Keram said, in a self-satisfied way, they might kill me, but they would know that, if I was with him, there would be unpleasantness afterwards.
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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... 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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Love of learning is a pleasant and universal bond since it deals with what one is and not what one has.
Freya Stark
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The art of learning fundamental common values is perhaps the greatest gain of travel to those who wish to live at ease among their fellows.
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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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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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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I dislike being an anvil for the hammering out of other people's virtues.
Freya Stark
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Style is something peculiar to one person it expresses one personality and one only it cannot be shared.
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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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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words are but drops pressed out of the lives of those who lived them.
Freya Stark