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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

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

More quotes by Freya Stark

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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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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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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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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
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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
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Time is the sea in which men grow, are born, or die.
Freya Stark
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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.
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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The true fruit of travel is perhaps the feeling of being nearly everywhere at home.
Freya Stark
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All our acts have sacramental possibilities.
Freya Stark
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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
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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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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 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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I dislike being an anvil for the hammering out of other people's virtues.
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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Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life, and from this want of recognition come half our domestic troubles.
Freya Stark
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One is so apt to think of people's affection as a fixed quantity, instead of a sort of moving so with the tide, always going out or coming in but still fundamentally there: and I believe this difficulty in making allowance for the tide is the reason for half the broken friendships.
Freya Stark
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The art of advertising - untruthfulness combined with repetition.
Freya Stark
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Few are the giants of the soul who actually feel that the human race is their family circle.
Freya Stark