Freya Stark Quotes
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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.
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In one form or another, conscious or unconscious, we have all become propagandists; integrity alone can keep us truthful.
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The camel is an ugly animal, seen from above. Its shoulders slope formless like a sack, its silly little ears and fluff of bleached curls behind them have a respectable, boarding-house look, like some faded neatness that dresses for propriety but never dressed for love.
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the main necessity on both sides of a revolution is kindness, which makes possible the most surprising things. To treat one's neighbor as oneself is the fundamental maxim for revolution.
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The portion we see of human beings is very small: their formats and faces, voices and words.... beyond these, like an immense dark continent, lies all that has made them.
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advertisement ... has brought our disregard for truth into the open without even a figleaf to cover it.
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Manners are like zero in arithmetic. They may not be much in themselves, but they are capable of adding a great deal of value to everything else.
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Pain and fear and hunger are effects of causes which can be foreseen and known: but sorrow is a debt which someone else makes for us.
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If we are strong, and have faith in life and its richness of surprises, and hold the rudder steadily in our hands. I am sure we will sail into quiet and pleasant waters for our old age.
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The art of learning fundamental common values is perhaps the greatest gain of travel to those who wish to live at ease among their fellows.
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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.
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We love those people who give with humility, or who accept with ease.
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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.
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A part of all art is to make silence speak. The things left out in painting, the note withheld in music, the void in architecture - all are as necessary and as active as the utterance itself.
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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.
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Love, like broken porcelain, should be wept over and buried, for nothing but a miracle will resuscitate it: but who in this world has not for some wild moments thought to recall the irrecoverable with words?
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Every victory of man over man has in itself a taste of defeat.... There is no essential difference between the various human groups, creatures whose bones and brains and members are the same; and every damage we do there is a form of mutilation, as if the fingers of the left hand were to be cut off by the right.
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This is excellence - the following of anything for its own sake and with its own integrity.
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The symbol is greater than visible substance. . . . Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.
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All the feeling which my father could not put into words was in his hand-any dog, child or horse would recognize the kindness of it.
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The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised.
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Nearly all trouble comes from mis-timing.
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An absolute condition of all successful living, whether for an individual or a nation, is the acceptance of death.
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The artist's business is to take sorrow when it comes. The depth and capacity of his reception is the measure of his art; and when he turns his back on his own suffering, he denies the very laws of his being and closes the door on everything that can ever make him great.