Freya Stark Quotes

... there are few things that can reconcile us fully to our parting with a world of which the longest life can see so little and whose beauties have so extraordinary a variety.

The perpetual charm of Arabia is that the traveler finds his level there simply as a human being; the people's directness, deadly to the sentimental or pedantic, likes the less complicated virtues.

The portion we see of human beings is very small: their formats and faces, voices and words.... beyond these, like an immense dark continent, lies all that has made them.

It is better to be passionate than to be tolerant at the expense of one's soul.

The beckoning counts, and not the clicking of the latch behind you.

If one were given a single window from which to look upon the changing Eastern world, it should face, I think, the road.

It is only the unexpected that ever makes a customs officer think.

Whoever designed this frigging map was having a laugh. Just around the corner, my arse.

The greatest of mythologies divided its gods into creators, preservers and destroyers. Tidiness obviously belongs to the second category, which mitigates the terrific impact of the other two.

This is excellence - the following of anything for its own sake and with its own integrity.

Life, to be happy at all, must be in its way a sacrament, and it is a failure in religion to divorce it from the holy acts of everyday, of ordinary human existence.

I do dislike people with Moral Aims. Everyone asks me why I learn Arabic, and when I say I just like it, they looked shocked and incredulous.

I feel like a divorced wife once my book is published and has left me, and hate to be brought back into intimate contact!

Conventions are like coins, an easy way of dealing with the commerce of relations.

Your real progressives are never fair: they are never sufficiently neutral.

Who dares to be intellectual in the presence of death?

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.

Nearly all trouble comes from mis-timing.

Revolution is man's normal activity, and if he is wise he will grade it slowly so that it may be almost imperceptible - otherwise it will jerk in fits and starts and cause discomfort.

Things good in themselves ... perfectly valid in the integrity of their origins, become fetters if they cannot alter.

The symbol is greater than visible substance. . . . Unhappy the land that has no symbols, or that chooses their meaning without great care.

We love those people who give with humility, or who accept with ease.

There are, I sometimes think, only two sorts of people in this world - the settled and the nomad - and there is a natural antipathy between them, whatever the land to which they may belong.

words are but drops pressed out of the lives of those who lived them.

Style is something peculiar to one person; it expresses one personality and one only; it cannot be shared.

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.

it is a lean employment of time to brood on what might have happened along some other turning.

It is not badness, it is the absence of goodness, which, in Art as in Life, is so depressing.

I think that the worst unpleasantness of age is not its final fact ... but the tediousness of preparation, the accumulating number of defeats.

Words are the only arteries of thought our poor human body possesses.

Fair and unfair are among the most influential words in English and must be delicately used.

There is generosity in giving, but gentleness in receiving.

I suspect anyone self-satisfied enough to refuse lawful pleasures: we are not sufficiently rich in our separate resources to reject the graces of the universe when offered.

... 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.

The beckoning counts, not the clicking latch behind you

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

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

Things good in themselves ... perfectly valid in the integrity of their origins become fetters if they cannot alter.

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

Style is something peculiar to one person it expresses one personality and one only it cannot be shared.

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.

To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.