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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.
Freya Stark -
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.
Freya Stark
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One life is an absurdly small allowance.
Freya Stark -
it is a lean employment of time to brood on what might have happened along some other turning.
Freya Stark -
Tolerance cannot afford to have anything to do with the fallacy that evil may convert itself to good.
Freya Stark -
I have long come to believe that, more than any other destruction, our word-recklessness is endangering the future of us all.
Freya Stark -
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 -
It is not badness, it is the absence of goodness, which, in Art as in Life, is so depressing.
Freya Stark
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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.
Freya Stark -
To feel, and think, and learn - learn always: surely that is being alive and young in the real sense
Freya Stark -
Generalizations, one is told, are dangerous. So is life, for that matter, and it is built up on generalization - from the earliest effort of the adventurer who dared to eat a second berry because the first had not killed him.
Freya Stark -
Risk is the salt and sugar of life.
Freya Stark -
... 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 -
Conventions are like coins, an easy way of dealing with the commerce of relations.
Freya Stark
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Christmas, in fact, is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart: like a nursery story, its validity rests on exact repetition, so that it comes around every time as the evocation of one's whole life and particularly of the most distant bits of it in childhood.
Freya Stark -
Words are the only arteries of thought our poor human body possesses.
Freya Stark -
... it is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization.
Freya Stark -
Whatever the advantages of the machine may be - and they are many - the very ease of its use is bound to make away with intimacy - the intercourse of human beings, of animals, or of that which we still think of as the natural world.
Freya Stark -
Style is something peculiar to one person; it expresses one personality and one only; it cannot be shared.
Freya Stark -
Your real progressives are never fair: they are never sufficiently neutral.
Freya Stark
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One has to resign oneself to being a nuisance if one wants to get anything done.
Freya Stark -
One can only really travel if one lets oneself go and takes what every place brings without trying to turn it into a healthy private pattern of one's own and I suppose that is the difference between travel and tourism.
Freya Stark -
The past is our treasure. Its works, whether we know them or not, flourish in our lives with whatever strength they had. From it we draw provision for our journey, the collected wisdom whose harvests are all ours to reap and carry with us, though we may never live again in the fields that grew them.
Freya Stark -
I do like people who have not yet made up their minds about everything, who in fact are still receiving
Freya Stark