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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

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

More quotes by Freya Stark

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every frontier is doomed to produce an opposition beyond it. Nothing short of the universal can build the unfenced peace.
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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Risk is the salt and sugar of life.
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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
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Christmas... is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart.
Freya Stark
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All our acts have sacramental possibilities.
Freya Stark
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words are but drops pressed out of the lives of those who lived them.
Freya Stark
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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
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Conventions are like coins, an easy way of dealing with the commerce of relations.
Freya Stark
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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
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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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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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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
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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
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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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There is generosity in giving, but gentleness in receiving.
Freya Stark
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A pen and a notebook and a reasonable amount of discrimination will change a journey from a mere annual into a perennial, its pleasures and pains renewable at will.
Freya Stark
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Style is something peculiar to one person it expresses one personality and one only it cannot be shared.
Freya Stark
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... freshness trembles beneath the surface of Everyday, a joy perpetual to all who catch its opal lights beneath the dust of habit.
Freya Stark
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... 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