Freya Stark Quotations

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.

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 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.

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

Love, like broken porcelain, should be wept over and buried, for nothing but a miracle will resuscitate it: but who in this world has not for some wild moments thought to recall the irrecoverable with words?

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

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.

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

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 ...

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.

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.

One is so apt to think of people's affection as a fixed quantity, instead of a sort of moving so with the tide, always going out or coming in but still fundamentally there: and I believe this difficulty in making allowance for the tide is the reason for half the broken friendships.

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

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

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

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.

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.

... 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.

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.

The art of advertising - untruthfulness combined with repetition.

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 ...

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 ...

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

The camel carries on his dreary circular task with his usual slow and pompous step and head poised superciliously, as if it were a ritual affair above the comprehension of the vulgar; and no doubt he comforts himself for the dullness of life by a sense of virtue, like many other formalists beside him.

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

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.

All our acts have sacramental possibilities.

On the whole, age comes more gently to those who have some doorway into an abstract world-art, or philosophy, or learning-regions where the years are scarcely noticed and the young and old can meet in a pale truthful light.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

On the other hand, there is a certain advantage in traveling with someone who has a reputation for shooting rather than being shot: as Keram said, in a self-satisfied way, they might kill me, but they would know that, if I was with him, there would be unpleasantness afterwards.

Nearly all trouble comes from mis-timing ...

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

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.

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

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

It seems to me that the only thing for a pacifist to do is to find a substitute for war: mountains and seafaring are the only ones I know. But it must be something sufficiently serious not to be a game and sufficiently dangerous to exercise those virtues which otherwise get no chance.

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

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

Constancy, far from being a virtue, seems often to be the besetting sin of the human race, daughter of laziness and self-sufficiency, sister of sleep, the cause of most wars and practically all persecutions.

not wholly consciously, but not quite unconsciously, as far as I can remember, I determined to fashion my future as a sculptor his marble, and there was in it the same mixture of foresight and the unknown. The thing in the mind of the artist takes its way and imposes its form as it wakens under his hand. And so with life.

The tourist travels in his own atmosphere like a snail in his shell and stands, as it were, on his own perambulating doorstep to look at the continents of the world. But if you discard all this, and sally forth with a leisurely and blank mind, there is no knowing what may not happen to you.

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.

... 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.

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

... 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.

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 ...

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

... I cannot think a civilization worth having that does not encourage and enable its subjects to spend something, not extorted by governments but freely given to keep wretchedness at least from the streets they walk through day by day.

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.

All greatness in style begins, I imagine, with such respect, deep and passionate enough to produce a humility which will not assert itself at the expense even of inanimate things: out of which submissiveness a desire to serve is born, in disinterested accuracy toward the object, whatever it may be.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Accuracy is the basis of style. Words dress our thoughts and should fit; and should fit not only in their utterances, but in their implications, their sequences, and their silences, just as in architecture the empty spaces are as important as those that are filled.

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

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

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 ...

... except in the eyes of a few fanatics (untrustworthy as all lovers) an unmitigated expanse of water is dull even when blue: not in a small boat, where you are part of the winds and currents and tides and are allowed to hold the tiller now and then; but from those decks which the shipping companies with subconscious insight try to make as suburban as possible so that the impact of the monster outside may be lessened, and where the unrecognized boredom is so deep that a wispy smear of smoke on the horizon will queue up a crowd as if for a Valkyrie passing.

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 ...

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

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

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

Good days are to be gathered like grapes, to be trodden and bottled into wine and kept for age to sip at ease beside the fire. If the traveler has vintaged well, he need trouble to wander no longer; the ruby moments glow in his glass at will.

Every victory of man over man has in itself a taste of defeat.... There is no essential difference between the various human groups, creatures whose bones and brains and members are the same; and every damage we do there is a form of mutilation, as if the fingers of the left hand were to be cut off by the right.

I have met charming people, lots who would be charming if they hadn't got a complex about the British and everyone has pleasant and cheerful manners and I like most of the American voices. On the other hand I don't believe they have any God and their hats are frightful. On balance I prefer the Arabs.

This is a great moment, when you see, however distant, the goal of your wandering. The thing which has been living in your imagination suddenly become part of the tangible world. It matters not how many ranges, rivers or parching dusty ways may lie between you; it is yours now for ever.

Risk is the salt and sugar of life.

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

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

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

Perhaps the best function of parenthood is to teach the young creature to love with safety, so that it may be able to venture unafraid when later emotion comes; 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. To disapprove, to condemn the human soul shrivels under barren righteousness.

There is generosity in giving, but gentleness in receiving.