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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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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
Think
Finals
Thinking
Defeat
Number
Numbers
Unpleasantness
Worst
Accumulating
Age
Defeats
Fact
Preparation
Facts
Final

More quotes by Freya Stark

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youth looks at its world and age looks through it youth must get busy on problems whose outlines stand single and strenuous before it, while age can, with luck, achieve a cosmic private harmony unsuited for action as a rule.
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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.
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This is excellence - the following of anything for its own sake and with its own integrity.
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words are but drops pressed out of the lives of those who lived them.
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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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every frontier is doomed to produce an opposition beyond it. Nothing short of the universal can build the unfenced peace.
Freya Stark
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The true fruit of travel is perhaps the feeling of being nearly everywhere at home.
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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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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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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One has to resign oneself to being a nuisance if one wants to get anything done.
Freya Stark
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I do dislike people with Moral Aims. Everyone asks me why I learn Arabic, and when I say I just like it, they looked shocked and incredulous.
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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Conventions are like coins, an easy way of dealing with the commerce of relations.
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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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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What I find trying in a country which you do not understand and where you cannot speak, is that you can never be yourself.
Freya Stark
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To feel, and think, and learn - learn always: surely that is being alive and young in the real sense
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