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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To awaken quite alone in a strange town, is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.
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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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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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Fair and unfair are among the most influential words in English and must be delicately used.
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There is generosity in giving, but gentleness in receiving.
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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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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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... 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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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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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 unexpectedness of life, waiting round every corner, catches even wise women unawares (...) To avoid corners altogether is, after all, to refuse to live.
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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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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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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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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.
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The only thing for a pacifist to do is to find a substitute for war.
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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.
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One life is an absurdly small allowance.
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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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Tolerance cannot afford to have anything to do with the fallacy that evil may convert itself to good.
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To feel, and think, and learn - learn always: surely that is being alive and young in the real sense
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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.