Quote

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

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
Human
Finds
Pedantic
Humans
Likes
Arabia
People
Complicated
Deadly
Level
Traveler
Levels
Sentimental
Simply
Virtues
Virtue
Perpetual
Less
Charm
Directness

More quotes by 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
The beckoning counts, and not the clicking of the latch behind you.
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
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
Image
There is generosity in giving, but gentleness in receiving.
Freya Stark
Image
Conventions are like coins, an easy way of dealing with the commerce of relations.
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
To feel, and think, and learn - learn always: surely that is being alive and young in the real sense
Freya Stark
Image
Christmas... is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart.
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
Things good in themselves ... perfectly valid in the integrity of their origins, become fetters if they cannot alter.
Freya Stark
Image
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
Image
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
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
Risk is the salt and sugar of life.
Freya Stark
Image
The artist's business is to take sorrow when it comes. The depth and capacity of his reception is the measure of his art and when he turns his back on his own suffering, he denies the very laws of his being and closes the door on everything that can ever make him great.
Freya Stark
Image
This is excellence - the following of anything for its own sake and with its own integrity.
Freya Stark
Image
The art of advertising - untruthfulness combined with repetition.
Freya Stark
Image
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
Image
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