Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Freya Stark

Image
... freshness trembles beneath the surface of Everyday, a joy perpetual to all who catch its opal lights beneath the dust of habit.
Freya Stark
Image
words are but drops pressed out of the lives of those who lived them.
Freya Stark
Image
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
Image
In one form or another, conscious or unconscious, we have all become propagandists integrity alone can keep us truthful.
Freya Stark
Image
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
Image
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
Image
One has to resign oneself to being a nuisance if one wants to get anything done.
Freya Stark
Image
The camel carries on his dreary circular task with his usual slow and pompous step and head poised superciliously, as if it were a ritual affair above the comprehension of the vulgar and no doubt he comforts himself for the dullness of life by a sense of virtue, like many other formalists beside him.
Freya Stark
Image
... 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
Image
Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.
Freya Stark
Image
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
Image
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
Image
All our acts have sacramental possibilities.
Freya Stark
Image
I can't get over the exciting beauty of New York - the pencil buildings so high and far that the blueness of the sky floats about them the feeling that one's taxis, and shopping, all go on in the deep canyon-beds of natural erosions rather than in the excrescences of human builders.
Freya Stark
Image
This is one of the charms of the desert, that removing as it does nearly all the accessories of life, we see the thin thread of necessities on which our human existence is suspended.
Freya Stark
Image
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
Image
All greatness in style begins, I imagine, with such respect, deep and passionate enough to produce a humility which will not assert itself at the expense even of inanimate things: out of which submissiveness a desire to serve is born, in disinterested accuracy toward the object, whatever it may be.
Freya Stark
Image
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
Image
Words are the only arteries of thought our poor human body possesses.
Freya Stark
Image
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.
Freya Stark