Quote

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

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
Happens
Persian
Two
Manuscripts
Doe
Yesterday
Anything
Exciting
Mind
Perspective
Years
Deal
Like
Thousand
Deals
Illuminated

More quotes by Freya Stark

Image
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
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
... there are few things that can reconcile us fully to our parting with a world of which the longest life can see so little and whose beauties have so extraordinary a variety.
Freya Stark
Image
... 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
Image
... it is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization.
Freya Stark
Image
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
Image
Few - very few - of our attainments are so profound that they are valid for always even if they are so, they need adjustment, a straightening here, a loosening there, like an old garment to be fitted to the body.
Freya Stark
Image
Words are the only arteries of thought our poor human body possesses.
Freya Stark
Image
Manners are like zero in arithmetic. They may not be much in themselves, but they are capable of adding a great deal of value to everything else.
Freya Stark
Image
All our acts have sacramental possibilities.
Freya Stark
Image
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
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
Risk is the salt and sugar of life.
Freya Stark
Image
I do think we should be provided with a new body about the age of thirty or so when we have learnt to attend to it with consideration.
Freya Stark
Image
This is excellence - the following of anything for its own sake and with its own integrity.
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
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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