Freya Stark Quotes
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There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.
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Love of learning is a pleasant and universal bond since it deals with what one is and not what one has.
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every frontier is doomed to produce an opposition beyond it. Nothing short of the universal can build the unfenced peace.
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Absence is one of the most useful ingredients of family life, and to dose it rightly is an art like any other.
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Who dares to be intellectual in the presence of death?
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To awaken quite alone in a strange town, is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.
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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.
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If one were given a single window from which to look upon the changing Eastern world, it should face, I think, the road.
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The essence of travel is diffuse. It is never there on the spot as it were, but always beyond: its symbol is the horizon, and its interest always lies over that edge in the unseen.
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There are, I sometimes think, only two sorts of people in this world - the settled and the nomad - and there is a natural antipathy between them, whatever the land to which they may belong.
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There is generosity in giving, but gentleness in receiving.
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Fair and unfair are among the most influential words in English and must be delicately used.
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We were not for underestimating magic - a life-conductor like the sap between the tree-stem and the bark. We know that it keeps dullness out of religion and poetry. It is probable that without it we might die.
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The only thing for a pacifist to do is to find a substitute for war.
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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.
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Tidiness ... makes life easier and more agreeable, does harm to no one and actually saves time and trouble to the person who practices it: there must be an ominous flaw to explain why millions of generations continue to reject it.
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From love one can only escape at the price of life itself; and no lessening of sorrow is worth exile from that stream of all things human and divine.
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Perhaps the best function of parenthood is to teach the young creature to love with safety, so that it may be able to venture unafraid when later emotion comes; 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. To disapprove, to condemn the human soul shrivels under barren righteousness.
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Like a human being, the mountain is a composite creature, only to be known after many a view from many a different point, and repaying this loving study, if it is anything of a mountain at all, by a gradual revelation of personality, an increase of significance.
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Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.
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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.
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Most people, after accomplishing something, use it over and over again like a gramophone record till it cracks, forgetting that the past is just the stuff with which to make more future.
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Good days are to be gathered like grapes, to be trodden and bottled into wine and kept for age to sip at ease beside the fire. If the traveler has vintaged well, he need trouble to wander no longer; the ruby moments glow in his glass at will.
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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.