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

More quotes by Freya Stark

Image
There is generosity in giving, but gentleness in receiving.
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
The true call of the desert, of the mountains, or the sea, is their silence - free of the networks of dead speech.
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
There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.
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
Things good in themselves ... perfectly valid in the integrity of their origins, become fetters if they cannot alter.
Freya Stark
Image
This is excellence - the following of anything for its own sake and with its own integrity.
Freya Stark
Image
The beckoning counts, and not the clicking of the latch behind you.
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
Image
every word calls up far more of a picture than its actual meaning is supposed to do, and the writer has to deal with all these silent associations as well as with the uttered significance.
Freya Stark
Image
The monstrosity of bureaucracy, I thought: always the pint-pot judging the gallon, the scribe's, the door-keeper's world. Always the stupidity of people who feel certain about things they never try to find out. A world that educates people to be ignorant - that is what this world of ours is.
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
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
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
Accuracy is the basis of style. Words dress our thoughts and should fit and should fit not only in their utterances, but in their implications, their sequences, and their silences, just as in architecture the empty spaces are as important as those that are filled.
Freya Stark
Image
The world has become too full of many things, an over furnished room.
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
words are but drops pressed out of the lives of those who lived them.
Freya Stark
Image
Risk is the salt and sugar of life.
Freya Stark