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
differences healthy trying
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.
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.
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 ...
zero may manners
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.
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.
christian practice giving
Once divested of missionary virus, the cult of our gods gives no offence. It would be a peaceful age if this were recognized, and religion, Christian, communist or any other, were to rely on practice and not on conversion for her growth.
love-of-learning deals pleasant
Love of learning is a pleasant and universal bond since it deals with what one is and not what one has.
circles race soul
Few are the giants of the soul who actually feel that the human race is their family circle.
mistake belief static
The most ominous of fallacies - the belief that things can be kept static by inaction
curiosity invincible one-thing
Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.
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.
timing trouble
Nearly all trouble comes from mis-timing ...
nice home rushing
... I want to be one of those people who are always to be found at home, nice restful people whom everybody likes because they give a feeling of permanence to this rushing world.
notebook pain journey
A pen and a notebook and a reasonable amount of discrimination will change a journey from a mere annual into a perennial, its pleasures and pains renewable at will.