Freya Stark famous quotes

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

#Inspirational #Life #Happiness

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

#Pain #Sorrow #Debt

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

#Christmas #Home #Heart

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

#Mistake #Belief #Static

Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.
-- Freya Stark

#Curiosity #Invincible

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

#Wise #Art #Travel

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.
-- Freya Stark

#Art #Wish #Fundamentals

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

#Art #Philosophy #Light

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.
-- Freya Stark

#Faith #Strong #Hands

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

#Death #Acceptance #Successful

All our acts have sacramental possibilities.
-- Freya Stark

#Possibility

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

#Real #Thinking #Alive

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

#Race #Circles #Soul

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

#Fairness #Influential #Unfair

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

#Integrity #Excellence #Sake

Christmas, in fact, is not an external event at all, but a piece of one's home that one carries in one's heart: like a nursery story, its validity rests on exact repetition, so that it comes around every time as the evocation of one's whole life and particularly of the most distant bits of it in childhood.
-- Freya Stark

#Christmas #Home #Heart

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

#Moving #Believe #Thinking

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

#Thinking #World #Faces

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

#Integrity #Adaptability

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

#Men #Sea #Born

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

#Change #Wise #Men

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.
-- Freya Stark

#Doubt #Usual #Comfort

Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life, and from this want of recognition come half our domestic troubles.
-- Freya Stark

#Discipline #Solitude #Penance

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

#Travel #Home #Feelings

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

#Wine #Good Day #Fire

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

#Doors #Judging #People

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.
-- Freya Stark

#Thinking #Age #Body

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

#Effort #Berries #Matter

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

#Believe #Long #Our Words

... 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

#World #Littles #Reconcile

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

#People #Arabia #Levels

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 ...
-- Freya Stark

#Years #Two #Yesterday

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

#Broken #Miracle #World

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

#Hate #Book #Wife

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

#Space #Silence #Style

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

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

#Association #Silent #Significance

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

#Body #Poor #Arteries

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

#Night #Thinking #Voice

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

#Knowing #Atmosphere #Mind

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.
-- Freya Stark

#Notebook #Pain #Journey

Your real progressives are never fair: they are never sufficiently neutral.
-- Freya Stark

#Real

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

#Thinking #Land #Two

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

#Christian #Practice #Giving

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

#Thinking #Numbers #Preparation

... 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

#Nice #Home #Rushing

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

#Art #Lying #Clouds

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

#Humble #Humility #People

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.
-- Freya Stark

#Past #People #Cracks

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

#Differences #Healthy #Trying

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

#Land #Unhappy #Substance

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

#People #Mind #Receiving

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.
-- Freya Stark

#Inspirational #Sex #Kids