Freya Stark Quotes

There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.

To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure.

Tolerance cannot afford to have anything to do with the fallacy that evil may convert itself to good.

Christmas... is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart.

The most ominous of fallacies - the belief that things can be kept static by inaction

The world has become too full of many things, an over furnished room.

This is one of the charms of the desert, that removing as it does nearly all the accessories of life, we see the thin thread of necessities on which our human existence is suspended.

You will, if you're wise and know the art of travel, let yourself go on the stream of the unknown and accept whatever comes in the spirit in which the gods may offer it.

The art of advertising - untruthfulness combined with repetition.

The true fruit of travel is perhaps the feeling of being nearly everywhere at home.

Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.

The only thing for a pacifist to do is to find a substitute for war.

To feel, and think, and learn - learn always: surely that is being alive and young in the real sense

I have long come to believe that, more than any other destruction, our word-recklessness is endangering the future of us all.

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.

The unexpectedness of life, waiting round every corner, catches even wise women unawares (...) To avoid corners altogether is, after all, to refuse to live.

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.

Most people, after accomplishing something, use it over and over again like a gramophone record till it cracks, forgetting that the past is just the stuff with which to make more future.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One has to resign oneself to being a nuisance if one wants to get anything done.

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.

Few are the giants of the soul who actually feel that the human race is their family circle.

... freshness trembles beneath the surface of Everyday, a joy perpetual to all who catch its opal lights beneath the dust of habit.

... it is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization.

Love of learning is a pleasant and universal bond since it deals with what one is and not what one has.

Risk is the salt and sugar of life.

Time is the sea in which men grow, are born, or die.

advertisement ... has brought our disregard for truth into the open without even a figleaf to cover it.

Absence is one of the most useful ingredients of family life, and to dose it rightly is an art like any other.

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.

In one form or another, conscious or unconscious, we have all become propagandists; integrity alone can keep us truthful.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I dislike being an anvil for the hammering out of other people's virtues.

The true call of the desert, of the mountains, or the sea, is their silence - free of the networks of dead speech.

every frontier is doomed to produce an opposition beyond it. Nothing short of the universal can build the unfenced peace.

I do like people who have not yet made up their minds about everything, who in fact are still receiving

All our acts have sacramental possibilities.

What I find trying in a country which you do not understand and where you cannot speak, is that you can never be yourself.

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.

I first noticed how the sound of water is like the talk of human voices, and would sometimes wake in the night and listen, thinking that a crowd of people were coming through the woods.

An absolute condition of all successful living, whether for an individual or a nation, is the acceptance of death.

One life is an absurdly small allowance.

The essence of travel is diffuse. It is never there on the spot as it were, but always beyond: its symbol is the horizon, and its interest always lies over that edge in the unseen.

From love one can only escape at the price of life itself; and no lessening of sorrow is worth exile from that stream of all things human and divine.