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
technology thinking animal
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.
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.
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.
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.
order practice generations
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.
travel sea silence
The true call of the desert, of the mountains, or the sea, is their silence - free of the networks of dead speech.
war substitutes pacifist
The only thing for a pacifist to do is to find a substitute for war.