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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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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
Following
Sake
Anything
Excellence
Integrity

More quotes by 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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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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words are but drops pressed out of the lives of those who lived them.
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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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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Pain and fear and hunger are effects of causes which can be foreseen and known: but sorrow is a debt which someone else makes for us.
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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All our acts have sacramental possibilities.
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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The tourist travels in his own atmosphere like a snail in his shell and stands, as it were, on his own perambulating doorstep to look at the continents of the world. But if you discard all this, and sally forth with a leisurely and blank mind, there is no knowing what may not happen to you.
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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Things good in themselves ... perfectly valid in the integrity of their origins, become fetters if they cannot alter.
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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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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Style is something peculiar to one person it expresses one personality and one only it cannot be shared.
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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... 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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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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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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... it is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization.
Freya Stark