Freya Stark Quotes

#1. 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.

Freya Stark

#2. 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.

Freya Stark

#3. The beckoning counts, not the clicking latch behind you

Freya Stark

#4. 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.

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

#6. 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.

Freya Stark

#7. 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.

Freya Stark

#8. 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.

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

#10. 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.

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

#13. Like a human being, the mountain is a composite creature, only to be known after many a view from many a different point, and repaying this loving study, if it is anything of a mountain at all, by a gradual revelation of personality, an increase of significance ...

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

#15. 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?

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

#17. 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.

Freya Stark

#18. 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.

Freya Stark

#19. 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 ...

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

#21. 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.

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

#23. Generalizations, one is told, are dangerous. So is life, for that matter, and it is built up on generalization - from the earliest effort of the adventurer who dared to eat a second berry because the first had not killed him.

Freya Stark

#24. 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.

Freya Stark

#25. 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.

Freya Stark

#26. 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.

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

#29. 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.

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

#31. We were not for underestimating magic - a life-conductor like the sap between the tree-stem and the bark. We know that it keeps dullness out of religion and poetry. It is probable that without it we might die.

Freya Stark

#32. Surely, of all the wonders of the world, the horizon is the greatest.

Freya Stark

#33. 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.

Freya Stark

#34. 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 pleasent waters for our old age.

Freya Stark

#35. 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.

Freya Stark

#36. 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.

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

#38. 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 ...

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

#40. One life is an absurdly small allowance.

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

#42. Words are but drops pressed out of the lives of those who lived them.

Freya Stark

#43. 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.

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

#47. 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.

Freya Stark

#48. 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.

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

#53. Risk is the salt and sugar of life.

Freya Stark

#54. Who dares to be intellectual in the presence of death?

Freya Stark

#55. 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.

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

#57. 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.

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

#59. 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.

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

#61. There is generosity in giving, but gentleness in receiving.

Freya Stark

#62. 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.

Freya Stark

#63. Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.

Freya Stark

#64. The camel is an ugly animal, seen from above. Its shoulders slope formless like a sack, its silly little ears and fluff of bleached curls behind them have a respectable, boarding-house look, like some faded neatness that dresses for propriety but never dressed for love.

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

#69. 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.

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

#75. 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 ...

Freya Stark

#76. The artist's business is to take sorrow when it comes. The depth and capacity of his reception is the measure of his art; and when he turns his back on his own suffering, he denies the very laws of his being and closes the door on everything that can ever make him great.

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

#78. 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.

Freya Stark

#79. I have no reason to go, except that I have never been, and knowledge is better than ignorance. What better reason could there be for travelling?

Freya Stark

#80. 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 ...

Freya Stark

#81. 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 ...

Freya Stark

#82. 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.

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

#85. 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.

Freya Stark

#86. 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 ...

Freya Stark

#87. 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.

Freya Stark

#88. 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.

Freya Stark

#89. 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.

Freya Stark

#90. 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.

Freya Stark

#91. 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.

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

#93. 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.

Freya Stark

#94. The past is our treasure. Its works, whether we know them or not, flourish in our lives with whatever strength they had. From it we draw provision for our journey, the collected wisdom whose harvests are all ours to reap and carry with us, though we may never live again in the fields that grew them.

Freya Stark

#95. Nearly all trouble comes from mis-timing ...

Freya Stark

#96. 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.

Freya Stark

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

Freya Stark

#98. All our acts have sacramental possibilities.

Freya Stark

#99. Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.

Freya Stark

#100. 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.

Freya Stark