Freya Stark
Freya Stark
Dame Freya Madeline Stark, Mrs Perowne, DBEwas a British explorer and travel writer. She wrote more than two dozen books on her travels in the Middle East and Afghanistan, as well as several autobiographical works and essays. She was one of the first non-Arabians to travel through the southern Arabian Deserts...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionMemoirist
Date of Birth31 January 1893
CityParis, France
boredom bed coffins
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.
years two yesterday
The Persian's mind, like his illuminated manuscripts, does not deal in perspective: two thousand years, if he happens to know anything about them, are as exciting as the day before yesterday ...
civilization matter decay
... it is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization.
weed flower thinking
The true gardener then brushes over the ground with slow and gentle hand, to liberate a space for breath round some favorites; but he is not thinking about destruction except incidentally. It is only the amateur like myself who becomes obsessed and rejoices with a sadistic pleasure in weeds that are big and bad enough to pull, and at last, almost forgetting the flowers altogether, turns into a Reformer.
humility humble giving
We love those people who give with humility, or who accept with ease.
kindness fundamentals revolution
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.
evil tolerance may
Tolerance cannot afford to have anything to do with the fallacy that evil may convert itself to good.
doors people judging
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 ...
pain sorrow causes
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.
art untruthfulness advertising
The art of advertising - untruthfulness combined with repetition.
christmas home heart
Christmas... is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart.
art lying clouds
A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.
stupid women comfort
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.
sex love-is roots
... 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.