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
humility humble giving
We love those people who give with humility, or who accept with ease.
life change art
The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. 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 traveling brotherhood.
moving heart thinking
To think to keep things as they are, is to let them move unpredictably, since nothing but death will still the beat of the heart or keep the universe from its perpetual motion.
acceptance personality style
Style is something peculiar to one person; it expresses one personality and one only; it cannot be shared.
profound needs body
Few - very few - of our attainments are so profound that they are valid for always; even if they are so, they need adjustment, a straightening here, a loosening there, like an old garment to be fitted to the body ...
intellectual dare
Who dares to be intellectual in the presence of death?
integrity excellence sake
This is excellence - the following of anything for its own sake and with its own integrity ...
fairness influential unfair
Fair and unfair are among the most influential words in English and must be delicately used.
effort matter firsts
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.
peace produce frontiers
every frontier is doomed to produce an opposition beyond it. Nothing short of the universal can build the unfenced peace.
depressing art evil
It is not badness, it is the absence of goodness, which, in Art as in Life, is so depressing.
tree magic sap
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.
coins way easy
Conventions are like coins, an easy way of dealing with the commerce of relations.
silly animal house
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.